Samuel Butler Quotes

"The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places."

"The advantage of doing one's praising to oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places"

"There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire absence of thought."

"It is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us."

"A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg."

"Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them."

"Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children."

"To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead."

"The history of art is the history of revivals."

"In law, nothing is certain but the expense."

"God cannot alter the past, though historians can."

"Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on."

"Friendship is like money, easier made than kept."

"Genius is a nuisance, and it is the duty of schools and colleges to abate it by setting genius-traps in its way."

"It has beeen said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly."

"The thief. Once committed beyond a certain point he should not worry himself too much about not being a thief any more. Thieving is God's message to him. Let him try and be a good thief."

"Let who will boast their courage in the field, I find but little safety from my shield. Nature's, not honour's, law we must obey: This made me cast my useless shield away, And by a prudent flight and cunning save a life, which valour could not, from"

"Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself"

"Neither irony or sarcasm is argument."

"Arguments are like fire-arms which a man may keep at home but should not carry about with him."