Samuel Butler

“An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.”

“A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.”

“Embryos think with each stage of their development that they have now reached the only condition that really suits them. This, they say, must certainly be their last, inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock that nothing can survive it. Every change is a shock; every shock is a pro tanto death. What we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to recognize a past and a present as resembling one another. ”

“It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can --it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.”

“Truth might be heroic, but it was not within the range of practical domestic politics.”

“They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?”

“There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.”

“Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.”

“Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better.”

“I said to him one day that the very slender reward which God had attached to the pursuit of serious inquiry was a sufficient proof that He disapproved of it, or at any rate that he did not set much store by it nor wish to encourage it.”

“Pleasure, after all, is a safer guide than either right or duty. For hard as it is to know what gives us pleasure, right and duty are often still harder to distinguish and, if we go wrong with them, will lead us into just as sorry a plight as a mistaken opinion concerning pleasure. When men burn their fingers through following after pleasure they find out their mistake and get to see where they have gone wrong more easily than when they have burnt them through following after a fancied duty, or a fancied idea concerning right virtue. The devil, in fact, when he dresses himself in angel's clothes, can only be detected by experts of exceptional skill, and so often does he adopt this disguise that it is hardly safe to be seen talking to an angel at all, and prudent people will follow after pleasure as a more homely but more respectable and on the whole much more trustworthy guide.”

“Young people have a marvellous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.”

“The major sin is the sin of being born.”

“Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.”

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

“I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.”

“Logic is like the sword--those who appeal to it shall perish by it.”

“The greatest 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.”

“Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.”

“Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.”

“Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such. ”

“Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it.”

“Life is like playing the violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.”

“The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.”

“If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.”

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