Samuel Butler

God and the Devil are an effort after specialization and the division of labor.

— Samuel Butler

People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and…

— Samuel Butler

For most men, and most circumstances, pleasure --tangible material prosperity in this world --is the safest test of virtue. Progress has ever…

— Samuel Butler

To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all.

— Samuel Butler

If the headache would only precede the intoxication, alcoholism would be a virtue.

— Samuel Butler

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

— Samuel Butler

“Every one should keep a mental wastepaper basket and the older he grows the more things he will consign to it -…

— Samuel Butler

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

— 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

Be virtuous and you will be vicious.

— Samuel Butler

In practice it is seldom very hard to do one's duty when one knows what it is, but it is sometimes extremely…

— Samuel Butler

I believe that he was really sorry that people would not believe he was sorry that he was not more sorry.

— Samuel Butler

There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire absence of thought.

— Samuel Butler

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

— Samuel Butler

Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.

— Samuel Butler

The man who takes time to explain his mistakes has little time left for anything else

— Samuel Butler

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

— Samuel Butler

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

— Samuel Butler

[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.

— Samuel Butler

Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.

— Samuel Butler

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

— Samuel Butler

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

— Samuel Butler

Young as he was, his instinct told him that the best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go…

— Samuel Butler

“For Rhime the Rudder is of Verses, With which like Ships they steer their courses.”

— Samuel Butler

People are lucky and unlucky...according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.

— Samuel Butler