Samuel Butler famous quotes

Spare the rod and spoil the child.
-- Samuel Butler

#Children #Punishment #Moments

Prayers are to men as dolls are to children. They are not without use and comfort, but it is not easy to take them very seriously.
-- Samuel Butler

#Prayer #Children #Men

Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another. To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to forget and to forget is to die.
-- Samuel Butler

#Memories #Life And Death #Remember

Man, unlike the animals, has never learned that the sole purpose of life is to enjoy it.
-- Samuel Butler

#Nature #Men #Animal

The foundations which we would dig about and find are within us, like the kingdom of heaven, rather than without.
-- Samuel Butler

#Heaven #Progress #Kingdoms

I fall asleep in the full and certain hope That my slumber shall not be broken; And that, though I be all-forgetting, Yet shall I not be all-forgotten, But continue that life in the thoughts and deeds of those I have loved.
-- Samuel Butler

#Death #Prayer #Fall

When people talk of atoms obeying fixed laws, they are either ascribing some kind of intelligence and free will to atoms or they are talking nonsense. There is no obedience unless there is at any rate a potentiality of disobeying.
-- Samuel Butler

#Science #Talking #Law

Youth is like spring, an over praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.
-- Samuel Butler

#Time #Spring #Fall

Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud.
-- Samuel Butler

#Teacher #Appreciation #Flower

Business should be like religion and science; it should know neither love nor hate.
-- Samuel Butler

#Hate #Science #Should

Friends are like money, easier made than kept.
-- Samuel Butler

#Friendship #Easier #Made

Flying. Whatever any other organism has been able to do man should surely be able to do also, though he may go a different way about it.
-- Samuel Butler

#Airplane #Men #Flying

Whatsoever we perpetrate, we do but row; we are steered by fate.
-- Samuel Butler

#Fate #Destiny

The public do not know enough to be experts, but know enough to decide between them.
-- Samuel Butler

#Experts #Enough #Knows

When the water of a place is bad it is safest to drink none that has not been filtered through either the berry of a grape, or else a tub of malt. These are the most reliable filters yet invented.
-- Samuel Butler

#Water #Filters #Berries

He that complies against his will, Is of his own opinion still.
-- Samuel Butler

#Agreement #Liberty #Opinion

There are two great rules of life; the one general and the other particular. The first is that everyone can, in the end, get what he wants, if he only tries. That is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is, more or less, an exception to the rule.
-- Samuel Butler

#Two #Exception To The Rule #Trying

An obstinate man does not hold opinions, but they hold him; for when he is once possessed with an error, it is, like a devil, only cast out with great difficulty.
-- Samuel Butler

#Men #Errors #Devil

Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.
-- Samuel Butler

#Lying #Analogies #Dishonesty

All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it - and they do enjoy it as much as man and other circumstances will allow.
-- Samuel Butler

#Animal #Men #Humanity

Inspiration is never genuine if it is known as inspiration at the time. True inspiration always steals on a person; its importance not being fully recognized for some time.
-- Samuel Butler

#Inspirational #Stealing #Genuine

The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable, and absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is.
-- Samuel Butler

#Men #Vices #Virtue

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

#Home #Men #Fire

Brigands will demand your money or your life, but a woman will demand both
-- Samuel Butler

#Maturity #Demand #Women Bashing

The Bible may be the truth, but it is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
-- Samuel Butler

#Bible #Biblical #May

Since God himself cannot change the past, He is obliged to tolerate the existence of historians.
-- Samuel Butler

#Past #History #Existence

History is a bucket of ashes.
-- Samuel Butler

#Carpe Diem #Buckets #Ashes

I believe that he was really sorry that people would not believe he was sorry that he was not more sorry.
-- Samuel Butler

#Sorry #Regret #Believe

The course of true anything never does run smooth.
-- Samuel Butler

#Uplifting #Running #Adversity

There are two classes [of scientists], those who want to know, and do not care whether others think they know or not, and those who do not much care about knowing, but care very greatly about being reputed as knowing.
-- Samuel Butler

#Knowledge #Science #Thinking

There is no such source of error as the pursuit of absolute truth.
-- Samuel Butler

#Truth #Science #Errors

It is death, and not what comes after death, that men are generally afraid of.
-- Samuel Butler

#Fear #Men #Atheism

This world is like Noah's Ark. In which few men but many beasts embark.
-- Samuel Butler

#Fear #Men #Atheism

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
-- Samuel Butler

#Wisdom #Truth #Lying

Nature. As the word is now commonly used it excludes nature's most interesting productions-the works of man. Nature is usually taken to mean mountains, rivers, clouds and undomesticated animals and plants. I am not indifferent to this half of nature, but it interests me much less than the other half.
-- Samuel Butler

#Nature #Taken #Mean

There is one class of mind that loves to lean on rules and definitions, and another that discards them as far as possible. A faddist will generally ask for a definition of faddism, and one who is not a faddist will be impatient of being asked to give one.
-- Samuel Butler

#Science #Class #Giving

If [science] tends to thicken the crust of ice on which, as it were, we are skating, it is all right. If it tries to find, or professes to have found, the solid ground at the bottom of the water it is all wrong. Our business is with the thickening of this crust by extending our knowledge downward from above, as ice gets thicker while the frost lasts; we should not try to freeze upwards from the bottom.
-- Samuel Butler

#Knowledge #Science #Ice

Whereas, to borrow an illustration from mathematics, life was formerly an equation of, say, 100 unknown quantities, it is now one of 99 only, inasmuch as memory and heredity have been shown to be one and the same thing.
-- Samuel Butler

#Life #Memories #Science

Science is being daily more and more personified and anthromorphized into a god. By and by they will say that science took our nature upon him, and sent down his only begotten son, Charles Darwin, or Huxley, into the world so that those who believe in him, &c.; and they will burn people for saying that science, after all, is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance.
-- Samuel Butler

#Nature #Believe #Ignorance

I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific bigwigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.
-- Samuel Butler

#Science #Giving #Literature

Men of Science. If they are worthy of the name they are indeed about God's path and about his bed and spying out all his ways.
-- Samuel Butler

#God #Science #Men

The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.
-- Samuel Butler

#Meat #Principles #Public Opinion

The only absolute morality is absolute stagnation.
-- Samuel Butler

#Ethics #Morality #Stagnation

He dons are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.
-- Samuel Butler

#Education #Teaching #Men

Our own death is a premium which we must pay for the far greater benefit we have derived from the fact that so many people have not only lived but also died before us.
-- Samuel Butler

#Death #People #Dying

If a man knows not life which he hath seen, how shall he know death, which he hath not seen?
-- Samuel Butler

#Death #Men #Dying

To die completely, a person must not only forget but be forgotten, and he who is not forgotten is not dead.
-- Samuel Butler

#Death #Dying #Forget

The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period.
-- Samuel Butler

#Art #Interesting #Youth

He is greatest who is most often in men's good thoughts.
-- Samuel Butler

#Greatness #Men #Good Thoughts

There is a photographer in every bush, going about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.
-- Samuel Butler

#Gossip #Roaring #Lions

Loyalty is still the same, whether it win or lose the game; as true as a dial to the sun, although it be not shined upon.
-- Samuel Butler

#Loyalty #Army #Winning

The human intellect owes its superiority over that of the lower animals in great measure to the stimulus which alcohol has given imagination.
-- Samuel Butler

#Beer #Animal #Imagination

There should be asylums for habitual teetotalers, but they would probably relapse into teetotalism as soon as they got out.
-- Samuel Butler

#Drinking #Asylums #Teetotalers

The wish to spread those opinions that we hold conducive to our own welfare is so deeply rooted in the English character that few of us can escape its influence.
-- Samuel Butler

#Character #Wish #Opinion

Adversity, if a man is set down to it by degrees, is more supportable with equanimity by most people than any great prosperity arrived at in a single lifetime.
-- Samuel Butler

#Failure #Adversity #Men

There is no permanent absolute unchangeable truth; what we should pursue is the most convenient arrangement of our ideas.
-- Samuel Butler

#Truth #Honesty #Ideas

It seems to be the fate of man to seek all his consolations in futurity. The time present is seldom able to fill desire or imagination with immediate enjoyment, and we are forced to supply its deficiencies by recollection or anticipation.
-- Samuel Butler

#Hope #Fate #Men

Cat-Ideas and Mouse-Ideas. We can never get rid of mouse-ideas completely, they keep turning up again and again, and nibble, nibble-no matter how often we drive them off. The best way to keep them down is to have a few good strong cat-ideas which will embrace them and ensure their not reappearing till they do so in another shape.
-- Samuel Butler

#Strong #Cat #Ideas

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.
-- Samuel Butler

#Wall #Science #Ideas

You cannot have a thing "matter" by itself which shall have no motion in it, nor yet a thing "motion" by itself which shall exist apart from matter; you must have both or neither. You can have matter moving much, or little, and in all conceivable ways; but you cannot have matter without any motion more than you can have motion without any matter that is moving.
-- Samuel Butler

#Moving #Science #Littles

They say the test of [literary power] is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, "Can he name a kitten?" And by this test I am condemned, for I cannot.
-- Samuel Butler

#Writing #Cat #Men

We all love best not those who offend us least, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.
-- Samuel Butler

#Forgiveness #Love Is #Forgiving

It is not sufficiently considered in the hour of exultation, that all human excellence is comparative; that no man performs much but in proportion to what other accomplish, or to the time and opportunities which have been allowed him.
-- Samuel Butler

#Success #Opportunity #Men

A man should have any number of little aims about which he should be conscious and for which he should have names, but he should have neither name for, nor consciousness concerning the main aim of his life.
-- Samuel Butler

#Inspirational #Wisdom #Men

How often do we not see children ruined through the virtues, real or supposed, of their parents?
-- Samuel Butler

#Children #Real #Parent

He was born stupid, and greatly increased his birthright.
-- Samuel Butler

#Sarcastic #Stupid #Born

Justice is my being allowed to do whatever I like. Injustice is whatever prevents my doing so.
-- Samuel Butler

#Justice #Injustice #Justice And Injustice

People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy.
-- Samuel Butler

#Happiness #Work #People

In practice it is seldom very hard to do one's duty when one knows what it is, but it is sometimes extremely difficult to find this out.
-- Samuel Butler

#Practice #Sometimes #Duty

Neither have they hearts to stay, nor wit enough to run away.
-- Samuel Butler

#Running #Heart #Enough