Samuel Butler, the Younger Quotes (27 Quotes)

It is better to have loved and lost than to never have lost at all.

Morality turns on whether the pleasure precedes or follows the pain. Thus it is immoral to get drunk because the headache comes after the drinking, but if the headache came first, and the drunkenness afterwards, it would be moral to get drunk.

Genius is a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble.

Some who had received a liberal education at the Colleges of Unreason, and taken the highest degrees in hypothetics, which are their principal study.

The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes 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.

'Man wants but little here below' but likes that little goodand not too long in coming.

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

... There can be no doubt about faith and not reason being the ultima ratio. Even Euclid, who has laid himself as little open to the charge of credulity as any writer who ever lived, cannot get beyond this. He has no demonstrable first premise. He requires postulates and axioms which transcend demonstration, and without which he can do nothing. His superstructure indeed is demonstration, but his ground his faith. Nor again can he get further than telling a man he is a fool if he persists in differing from him. He says 'which is absurd,' and declines to discuss the matter further. Faith and authority, therefore, prove to be as necessary for him as for anyone else.

It costs a lot of money to die comfortably.

I consider being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill.

As soon as any art is pursued with a view of money, then farewell, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, all hope of genuine good work.

All animals but men know that the principle business of life is to enjoy it and they do enjoy it as much as man and other circumstances will allow it.

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.

It hath been said that an unjust peace is to be preferred before a just war.

The New Jerusalem, when it comes, will probably be found so far to resemble the old as to stone its prophets freely.

Though wisdom cannot be gotten for gold, still less can it be gotten without it. Gold, or the value of whats equivalent to gold, lies at the root of wisdom, and enters so largely into the very essence of the Holy Ghost that no gold, no Holy Ghost may pass as an axiom.

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

Youth is like spring, an overpraised 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.

The most perfect humor and irony is generally quite unconscious.

Then he saw also that it matters little what profession, whether of religion or irreligion, a man may make, provided only he follows it outwith charitable inconsistency, and without insisting on it to the bitter end. It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and notin the dogma or want of dogma that the danger lies.

When the righteous man turneth away from his righteousness that he hath committed and doeth that which is neither quite lawful nor quite right, he will generally be found to have gained in amiability what he has lost in holiness.

It has been said that though 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.

The hen is an egg's way of producing another egg.

Theres many a good tune played on an old fiddle.

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

Independence is essential for permanent but fatal to immediate success.

Genius is no respecter of time, trouble, money or persons, the four things around which human affairs turn most persistently.