Samuel Butler Quotes

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

"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."

"People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable."

"Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it."

"Compound for sins they are inclined to by damning those they have no mind to."

"I believe that he was really sorry that people would not believe he was sorry that he was not more sorry."

"The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too."

"If people would dare to speak to one another unreservedly, there would be a good deal less sorrow in the world a hundred years hence."

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

"A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind."

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

"For most men, and most circumstances, pleasure --tangible material prosperity in this world --is the safest test of virtue. Progress has ever been through the pleasures rather than through the extreme sharp virtues, and the most virtuous have leaned to excess rather than to asceticism."

"In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved."

"A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog; but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide."

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

"A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand."

"Virtue knows that it is impossible to get on without compromise, and tunes herself, as it were, a trifle sharp to allow for an inevitable fall in playing."

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but a little want of knowledge is also a dangerous thing."

"For most men, and most circumstances, pleasure /tangible material prosperity in this world /is the safest test of virtue. Progress has ever been through the pleasures rather than through the extreme sharp virtues, and the most virtuous have leaned to excess rather than to asceticism."

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