Top 100 Samuel Butler Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Self-preservation is the first law of nature.”

— Samuel Butler

Featured in: Survival Quotes

2. “Look before you leap for as you sow, ye are like to reap.”

— Samuel Butler

3. “All animals except man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.”

— Samuel Butler

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

— Samuel Butler

Featured in: Quotes About Veganism

5. “Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule.”

— Samuel Butler

6. “You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.”

— Samuel Butler

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

— Samuel Butler

8. “Human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning.”

— Samuel Butler

9. “Life is one long process of getting tired.”

— Samuel Butler

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

— Samuel Butler

11. “Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.”

— Samuel Butler

12. “Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.”

— Samuel Butler

13. “Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime.”

— Samuel Butler

14. “Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.”

— Samuel Butler

15. “Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself, and the more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly will his character appear in spite of him.”

— Samuel Butler

16. “Nobody shoots at Santa Claus.”

— Samuel Butler

17. “No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.”

— Samuel Butler

18. “Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.”

— Samuel Butler

19. “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.”

— Samuel Butler

20. “It is tact that is golden, not silence.”

— Samuel Butler

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

— Samuel Butler

22. “Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.”

— Samuel Butler

23. “People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.”

— Samuel Butler

24. “A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.”

— Samuel Butler

25. “Morality is the custom of one’s country and the current feeling of one’s peers. Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country.”

— Samuel Butler

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

— Samuel Butler

27. “A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those worth committing.”

— Samuel Butler

28. “Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.”

— Samuel Butler

29. “Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds.”

— Samuel Butler

30. “A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.”

— Samuel Butler

31. “To live is like to love – all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.”

— Samuel Butler

32. “The worst thing that can happen to a man is to lose his money, the next worst his health, the next worst his reputation.”

— Samuel Butler

33. “Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.”

— Samuel Butler

34. “Prayers are to men as dolls are to children.”

— Samuel Butler

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

— Samuel Butler

36. “To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.”

— Samuel Butler

37. “Conscience is thoroughly well bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it.”

— Samuel Butler

38. “Mr. Tennyson has said that more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of, but he wisely refrains from saying whether they are good or bad things.”

— Samuel Butler

39. “Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.”

— Samuel Butler

40. “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.”

— Samuel Butler

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

— Samuel Butler

42. “I know not why, but all the noblest arts hold in perfection but for a very little moment. They soon reach a height from which they begin to decline, and when they have begun to decline it is a pity that they cannot be knocked on the head; for an art is like a living organism – better dead than dying.”

— Samuel Butler

43. “Women can stand a beating except when it is with their own weapons.”

— Samuel Butler

44. “It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.”

— Samuel Butler

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

— Samuel Butler

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

— Samuel Butler

47. “Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.”

— Samuel Butler

48. “Christ and The Church: If he were to apply for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty, adultery and desertion, he would probably get one.”

— Samuel Butler

49. “A man’s friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage – but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.”

— Samuel Butler

50. “The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.”

— Samuel Butler