Top 100 Samuel Butler Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “It is hard enough to know whether one is happy or unhappy now, and still harder to compare the relative happiness or unhappiness of different times of one’s life; the utmost that can be said is that we are fairly happy so long as we are not distinctly aware of being miserable.”

— Samuel Butler

52. “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.”

— Samuel Butler

53. “A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it.”

— Samuel Butler

54. “Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.”

— Samuel Butler

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

— Samuel Butler

56. “Words are clothes that thoughts wear.”

— Samuel Butler

57. “All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.”

— Samuel Butler

58. “People are always in good company when they are doing what they really enjoy.”

— Samuel Butler

59. “Happiness and misery consist in a progression towards better or worse; it does not matter how high up or low down you are, it depends not on this, but on the direction in which you are tending.”

— Samuel Butler

60. “The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.”

— Samuel Butler

61. “Mention but the word “divinity,” and our sense of the divine is clouded.”

— Samuel Butler

62. “It is death, and not what comes after death, that men are generally afraid of.”

— Samuel Butler

63. “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.”

— Samuel Butler

64. “Opinions have vested interests just as men have.”

— Samuel Butler

65. “The evil that men do lives after them. Yes, and a good deal of the evil that they never did as well.”

— Samuel Butler

66. “Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.”

— Samuel Butler

67. “All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.”

— Samuel Butler

68. “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.”

— Samuel Butler

69. “It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.”

— Samuel Butler

70. “He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still.”

— Samuel Butler

71. “Exploring is delightful to look forward to and back upon, but it is not comfortable at the time, unless it be of such an easy nature as not to deserve the name.”

— Samuel Butler

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

— Samuel Butler

73. “An open mind is all very well in its way, but it ought not to be so open that there is no keeping anything in or out of it. It should be capable of shutting its doors sometimes, or it may be found a little drafty.”

— Samuel Butler

74. “Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.”

— Samuel Butler

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

— Samuel Butler

76. “There are orphanages,” he exclaimed to himself, “for children who have lost their parents – oh! why, why, why, are there no harbours of refuge for grown men who have not yet lost them?”

— Samuel Butler

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

— Samuel Butler

78. “No boy can resist being fed well by a good-natured and still handsome woman. Boys are very like nice dogs in this respect – give them a bone and they will like you at once.”

— Samuel Butler

79. “As there can be no translation from one language into another which shall not scant the meaning somewhat, or enlarge upon it, so there is no language which can render thought without a jarring and a harshness somewhere.”

— Samuel Butler

80. “When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.”

— Samuel Butler

81. “We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to them.”

— Samuel Butler

82. “I do not greatly care whether I have been right or wrong on any point, but I care a good deal about knowing which of the two I have been.”

— Samuel Butler

83. “We want words to do more than they can. We try to do with them what comes to very much like trying to mend a watch with a pickaxe or to paint a miniature with a mop; we expect them to help us to grip and dissect that which in ultimate essence is as ungrippable as shadow. Nevertheless there they are; we have got to live with them, and the wise course is to treat them as we do our neighbours, and make the best and not the worst of them.”

— Samuel Butler

84. “If a person would understand either the Odyssey or any other ancient work, he must never look at the dead without seeing the living in them, nor at the living without thinking of the dead. We are too fond of seeing the ancients as one thing and the moderns as another.”

— Samuel Butler

85. “Can anyone do much for anyone else unless by making a will in his favour and dying then and there? Should not each look after his own happiness, and will not the world be best carried on if everyone minds his own business and leaves other people to mind theirs?”

— Samuel Butler

86. “We all love best not those who offend us least, nor those who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.”

— Samuel Butler

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

— Samuel Butler

88. “To me it seems that those who are happy in this world are better and more lovable people than those who are not.”

— Samuel Butler

89. “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.”

— Samuel Butler

90. “An idea must not be condemned for being a little shy and incoherent; all new ideas are shy when introduced first among our old ones. We should have patience and see whether the incoherency is likely to wear off or to wear on, in which latter case the sooner we get rid of them the better.”

— Samuel Butler

91. “We are not won by arguments that we can analyse but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself.”

— Samuel Butler

92. “If people who are in a difficulty will only do the first little reasonable thing which they can clearly recognize as reasonable, they will always find the next step more easy both to see and take.”

— Samuel Butler

93. “A man at five and thirty should no more regret not having had a happier childhood than he should regret not having been born a prince of the blood.”

— Samuel Butler

94. “There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.”

— Samuel Butler

95. “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.”

— Samuel Butler

96. “If it was not such an awful thing to say of anyone, I should say that she meant well.”

— Samuel Butler

97. “Moral influence means persuading another that one can make that other more uncomfortable than that other can make oneself.”

— Samuel Butler

98. “A man’s friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage – but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends. The rift in friendship which invariably makes its appearance on the marriage of either of the parties to it was fast widening, as it no less invariably does, into the great gulf which is fixed between the married and the unmarried, and I was beginning to leave my protege to a fate with which I had neither right nor power to meddle.”

— Samuel Butler

99. “Embryo minds, like embryo bodies, pass through a number of strange metamorphoses before they adopt their final shape.”

— Samuel Butler

100. “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.”

— Samuel Butler