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Samuel Butler

81 quotes

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) was an English novelist, essayist, and critic whose iconoclastic wit challenged the Victorian establishment. His satirical novel *Erewhon* and the autobiographical *The Way of All Flesh* questioned received ideas about religion, family, and morality with a dry humor that was ahead of its time.

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

— Samuel Butler

Experience

All Quotes by Samuel Butler

“The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.”

— Samuel Butler

Death

“Theist and atheist: the fight between them is as to whether God shall be called God or shall have some other name.”

— Samuel Butler

God

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

— Samuel Butler

Funny

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

— Samuel Butler

Music

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

— Samuel Butler

Art

“Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbours, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them.”

— Samuel Butler

Best

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

— Samuel Butler

Home

“If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.”

— Samuel Butler

Death

“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

Architecture

“The Bible may be the truth, but it is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

— Samuel Butler

Truth

“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

Marriage

“Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.”

— Samuel Butler

Respect

“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

Death

“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

Music

“Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.”

— Samuel Butler

Life

“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

Health

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

— Samuel Butler

Life

“To know God better is only to realize how impossible it is that we should ever know him at all. I know not which is more childish to deny him, or define him.”

— Samuel Butler

God

“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

Humor

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

— Samuel Butler

Power