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Life Quotes by Samuel Butler

42 Life quotes by Samuel Butler

All Life quotes Samuel Butler’s page

Animals are said to know that the main business of life is to enjoy it, a contrast to human doubts about purpose. The quotes suggest we should judge people by how they make us feel, and note that life can be as fleeting as morning dew or a flash of lightning. They also remark that drawing conclusions from limited facts is an art.

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

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Life is a long process of getting tired

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Life is one long process of getting tired.

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

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

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

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Brigands will demand your money or your life, but a woman will demand both

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“the principal business of life is to enjoy it.”

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I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged…

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Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.

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

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

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He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most. God will take care that we do not enjoy it any…

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

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

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Those who have never had a father can at any rate never know the sweets of losing one. To most men the…

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“we must judge men not so much by what they, as by what they make us feel that they have it in…

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There are two great rules in life, the one general and the other particular. The first is that every one can in…

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Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another. To live is to remember and to remember is to live.…

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There are two great rules of life; the one general and the other particular. The first is that everyone can, in the…

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A man should have any number of little aims about which he should be conscious and for which he should have names,…

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I fall asleep in the full and certain hope That my slumber shall not be broken; And that, though I be all-forgetting,…

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Whereas, to borrow an illustration from mathematics, life was formerly an equation of, say, 100 unknown quantities, it is now one of…

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“It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can --it is perhaps because they can be useful to…

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“So engrained in the human heart is the desire to believe that some people really do know what they say they know,…

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“All our lives long, every day and every hour, we are engaged in the process of accommodating our changed and unchanged selves…

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“I tell you, Edward, said my father with some severity, we must judge men not so much by what they do, as…

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Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.

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Life is not an exact science, it is an art.

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Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.

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Since God himself cannot change the past, He is obliged to tolerate the existence of historians.

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It is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who…

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If a man knows not life which he hath seen, how shall he know death, which he hath not seen?

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To live is like to love - all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.

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

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All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it - and they do enjoy it as…

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All of the animals except for man know that the principle business of life is to enjoy it.

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Man, unlike the animals, has never learned that the sole purpose of life is to enjoy it.

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Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises. Samuel Butler

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

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More by Samuel Butler

Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.

I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific bigwigs to…

If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.

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

The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.

Spare the rod and spoil the child.

Opinions have vested interests just as men have.

“we must judge men not so much by what they, as by what they make us feel that they have it in them to…

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

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

“Having, then, once introduced an element of inconsistency into his system, he was far too consistent not to be inconsistent consistently, and he lapsed…

Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.

A man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.

It is not sufficiently considered in the hour of exultation, that all human excellence is comparative; that no man performs much but in proportion…

“The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.”