Quotes by Samuel Butler
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
Self-preservation is the first law of nature.
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.
There is no bore like a clever bore.
Life is not an exact science, it is an art.
Life is one long process of getting tired.
I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.
Silence and tact may or may not be the same thing.
It is tact that is golden, not silence.
Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.
People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy.
What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, I bet that my Redeemer liveth.
We are not won by arguments that we can analyse but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself.
Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
In law, nothing is certain but the expense.
The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.
Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
The healthy stomach is nothing if it is not conservative. Few radicals have good digestions.
All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.
Academic and aristocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that common sense can rarely reach them.
Our ideas are for the most part like bad sixpences, and we spend our lives trying to pass them on one another.
The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.
To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.
The voice of the Lord is the voice of common sense, which is shared by all that is.
Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule.
