Samuel Butler Quotes

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Samuel Butler

Profession : Poet

Birth : December 4, 1835

There is no true gracefulness which is not epitomized goodness.

Samuel Butler

One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once.

Samuel Butler

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

If people would dare to speak to one another unreservedly, there would be a good deal less sorrow in the world a hundred years hence.

Samuel Butler

Vaccination is the medical sacrament corresponding to baptism. Whether it is or is not more efficacious I do not know.

Samuel Butler

In old times people used to try and square the circle; now they try and devise schemes for satisfying the Irish nation.

Samuel Butler

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

Samuel Butler

Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.

Samuel Butler

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

There is such a thing as doing good that evil may come.

Samuel Butler

The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

Samuel Butler

My main wish is to get my books into other people's rooms, and to keep other people's books out of mine.

Samuel Butler

Silence and tact may or may not be the same thing.

Samuel Butler

What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, I bet that my Redeemer liveth.

Samuel Butler

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Samuel Butler

If I die prematurely I shall be saved from being bored to death at my own success.

Samuel Butler

Men should not try to overstrain their goodness more than any other faculty, bodily or mental.

Samuel Butler

The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.

Samuel Butler

Let every man be true and every god a liar.

Samuel Butler

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

Samuel Butler