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If people who are in a difficulty will only do the first little reasonable thing which they can clearly recognize as reasonable, they will always find the next step more easy both to see and take. -- Samuel Butler
Friends are like money, easier made than kept. -- Samuel Butler
God cannot alter the past, though historians can. -- Samuel Butler
Mr. Tennyson has said that more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of, but he wisely refrains from saying whether they are good or bad things. -- Samuel Butler
There are two classes [of scientists], those who want to know, and do not care whether others think they know or not, and those who do not much care about knowing, but care very greatly about being reputed as knowing. -- Samuel Butler
In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa. -- Samuel Butler
To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty. -- Samuel Butler
Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies. -- Samuel Butler
Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds -- Samuel Butler
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
From a worldly point of view, there is no mistake so great as that of being always right. -- Samuel Butler
Life is one long process of getting tired. -- Samuel Butler
Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule. -- Samuel Butler
A man at five and thirty should no more regret not having had a happier childhood than he should regret not having been born a prince of the blood. -- Samuel Butler
There should be asylums for habitual teetotalers, but they would probably relapse into teetotalism as soon as they got out. -- Samuel Butler
We must judge men not so much by what they, as by what they make us feel that they have it in them to do. If a man has done enough in either painting, music, or the affairs of life, to make me feel that I might trust him in an emergency he has done enough -- Samuel Butler
Evil is like water, it abounds, is cheap, soon fouls, but runs itself clear of taint. -- Samuel Butler
Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another. To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to forget and to forget is to die. -- Samuel Butler
Spare the rod and spoil the child. -- Samuel Butler
Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity? -- Samuel Butler
The healthy stomach is nothing if it is not conservative. Few radicals have good digestions. -- Samuel Butler
Silence and tact may or may not be the same thing. -- Samuel Butler
The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable, and absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is. -- Samuel Butler
Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence. -- 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
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
The seven deadly sins: Want of money, bad health, bad temper, chastity, family ties, knowing that you know things, and believing in the Christian religion. -- Samuel Butler
Young people have a marvellous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances. -- Samuel Butler
I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable. -- Samuel Butler
Friendship is like money, easier made than kept. -- Samuel Butler
The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it. -- Samuel Butler
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income -- Samuel Butler
There is one class of mind that loves to lean on rules and definitions, and another that discards them as far as possible. A faddist will generally ask for a definition of faddism, and one who is not a faddist will be impatient of being asked to give one. -- Samuel Butler
For as whipp'd tops and bandied balls,
The learned hold, are animals;
So horses they affirm to be
Mere engines made by geometry -- Samuel Butler
We all love best not those who offend us least, nor those who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them. -- Samuel Butler
A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg. -- Samuel Butler
His knowledge was not far behind
The knight's, but of another kind,
And he another way came by't ;
Some call it Gifts, and some New Light.
A lib'ral art, that costs no pains
Of study, industry, or brains. -- Samuel Butler
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them. -- Samuel Butler
A physician's physiology has much the same relation to his power of healing as a cleric's divinity has to his power of influencing conduct. -- Samuel Butler
I said to him one day that the very slender reward which God had attached to the pursuit of serious inquiry was a sufficient proof that He disapproved of it, or at any rate that he did not set much store by it nor wish to encourage it. -- Samuel Butler
Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children. -- Samuel Butler
Prayers are to men as dolls are to children. -- Samuel Butler
Man, unlike the animals, has never learned that the sole purpose of life is to enjoy it. -- Samuel Butler
[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's. -- Samuel Butler
To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know he is dead. -- Samuel Butler
The history of art is the history of revivals. -- Samuel Butler
The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way. -- Samuel Butler
When people talk of atoms obeying fixed laws, they are either ascribing some kind of intelligence and free will to atoms or they are talking nonsense. There is no obedience unless there is at any rate a potentiality of disobeying. -- Samuel Butler
Every one should keep a mental wastepaper basket and the older he grows the more things he will consign to it - torn up to irrecoverable tatters. -- Samuel Butler
Oaths are but words, and words are but wind. -- Samuel Butler
If God wants us to do a thing, he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him. -- Samuel Butler
Happiness and misery consist in a progression towards better or worse; it does not matter how high up or low down you are, it depends not on this, but on the direction in which you are tending. -- Samuel Butler
No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction. -- Samuel Butler
Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost. -- Samuel Butler
The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money. -- Samuel Butler
Loyalty is still the same, whether it win or lose the game; true as a dial to the sun, although it be not shined upon. -- Samuel Butler
The greatest pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him, and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself, too. -- Samuel Butler
The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them. -- Samuel Butler
The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor. -- Samuel Butler
Union may be strength, but it is mere brute strength unless wisely directed. -- Samuel Butler
Men of Science. If they are worthy of the name they are indeed about God's path and about his bed and spying out all his ways. -- Samuel Butler
This world is like Noah's Ark.
In which few men but many beasts embark. -- Samuel Butler
My boy," returned my father, "you must not judge by the work, but by the work in connection with the surroundings. Could Giotto or Filippo Lippi, think you, have got a picture into the Exhibition? Would -- Samuel Butler
Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it. -- Samuel Butler
Our own death is a premium which we must pay for the far greater benefit we have derived from the fact that so many people have not only lived but also died before us. -- Samuel Butler
To die completely, a person must not only forget but be forgotten, and he who is not forgotten is not dead. -- Samuel Butler
A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand. -- Samuel Butler
Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers. -- Samuel Butler
It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can
it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence. -- Samuel Butler
There are two great rules of life; the one general and the other particular. The first is that everyone can, in the end, get what he wants, if he only tries. That is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is, more or less, an exception to the rule. -- Samuel Butler
When the water of a place is bad it is safest to drink none that has not been filtered through either the berry of a grape, or else a tub of malt. These are the most reliable filters yet invented. -- Samuel Butler
The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions. -- Samuel Butler
To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all. -- Samuel Butler
He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most. God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us. -- Samuel Butler
It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly. -- Samuel Butler
Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits. -- Samuel Butler
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
The major sin is the sin of being born. -- Samuel Butler
A skilful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war. -- Samuel Butler
When you have told anyone you have left him a legacy, the only decent thing to do is die at once. -- Samuel Butler
Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only. -- Samuel Butler
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
There is no permanent absolute unchangeable truth; what we should pursue is the most convenient arrangement of our ideas. -- Samuel Butler
Whatsoever we perpetrate, we do but row; we are steered by fate. -- 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
Letters are like wine; if they are sound they ripen with keeping. A man should lay down letters as he does a cellar of wine. -- Samuel Butler
All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others. -- Samuel Butler
The room in fact was as depressing from its slatternliness as from its atmosphere of erudition. -- Samuel Butler
He that complies against his will
Is of his own opinion still. -- Samuel Butler
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
The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds. -- Samuel Butler
There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death. -- 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
Theist and atheist: The fight between them is as to whether God shall be called God or shall have some other name. -- Samuel Butler
Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them. -- Samuel Butler
I fall asleep in the full and certain hope That my slumber shall not be broken; And that, though I be all-forgetting, Yet shall I not be all-forgotten, But continue that life in the thoughts and deeds of those I have loved. -- Samuel Butler
He is greatest who is most often in men's good thoughts. -- Samuel Butler
If I had shown half as many dangerous tendencies when I was a boy, my father would have apprenticed me to a greengrocer, of that I'm very sure, -- Samuel Butler
Peter remained on friendly terms with Christ notwithstanding Christ's having healed his mother-in-law. -- Samuel Butler
Whereas, to borrow an illustration from mathematics, life was formerly an equation of, say, 100 unknown quantities, it is now one of 99 only, inasmuch as memory and heredity have been shown to be one and the same thing. -- Samuel Butler
I have never written on any subject unless I believed that the authorities on it were hopelessly wrong. -- Samuel Butler
Those who have never had a father can at any rate never know the sweets of losing one. To most men the death of his father is a new lease of life. -- Samuel Butler
All animals except man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it. -- Samuel Butler
Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well. -- Samuel Butler
In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved. -- Samuel Butler
They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten? -- Samuel Butler
The dead should be judged like criminals, impartially, but they should be allowed the benefit of the doubt. -- Samuel Butler
God and the Devil are an effort after specialization and the division of labor. -- Samuel Butler
An obstinate man does not hold opinions, but they hold him; for when he is once possessed with an error, it is, like a devil, only cast out with great difficulty. -- Samuel Butler
Business should be like religion and science; it should know neither love nor hate. -- Samuel Butler
If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death. -- Samuel Butler
Money is the last enemy that shall never be subdued. While there is flesh there is money or the want of money, but money is always on the brain so long as there is a brain in reasonable order. -- Samuel Butler
Justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes. -- Samuel Butler
The want of money is the root of all evil. -- Samuel Butler
Words are clothes that thoughts wear -- 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
Priests are not men of the world; it is not intended that they should be; and a University training is the one best adapted to prevent their becoming so. -- Samuel Butler
Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance. -- Samuel Butler
An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books. -- Samuel Butler
Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both. -- Samuel Butler
A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget. -- Samuel Butler
Vaccination is the medical sacrament corresponding to baptism. Whether it is or is not more efficacious I do not know. -- Samuel Butler
Women can stand a beating except when it is with their own weapons. -- Samuel Butler
Inspiration is never genuine if it is known as inspiration at the time. True inspiration always steals on a person; its importance not being fully recognized for some time. -- Samuel Butler
There is such a thing as doing good that evil may come. -- Samuel Butler
The flesh of animals who feed excursively is allowed to have a higher flavour than that of those who are cooped up. May there not be the same difference between men who read as their taste prompts and men who are confined in cells and colleges to stated tasks? -- Samuel Butler
For truth is precious and divine, too rich a pearl for carnal swine. -- 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
The foundations which we would dig about and find are within us, like the kingdom of heaven, rather than without. -- Samuel Butler
There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire absence of thought. -- Samuel Butler
Opinions have vested interests just as men have. -- Samuel Butler
Exploring is delightful to look forward to and back upon, but it is not comfortable at the time, unless it be of such an easy nature as not to deserve the name. -- Samuel Butler
The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them. -- Samuel Butler
There is no bore like a clever bore. -- Samuel Butler
In law, nothing is certain but the expense. -- Samuel Butler
Virtue knows that it is impossible to get on without compromise, and tunes herself, as it were, a trifle sharp to allow for an inevitable fall in playing. -- Samuel Butler
I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them. -- Samuel Butler
There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon. -- Samuel Butler
Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it. -- Samuel Butler
Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character. -- Samuel Butler
If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason. -- Samuel Butler
The world is naturally averse to all truth it sees or hears
but swallows nonsense and a lie with greediness and gluttony. -- Samuel Butler
Self-preservation is the first law of nature. -- Samuel Butler
Having, then, once introduced an element of inconsistency into his system, he was far too consistent not to be inconsistent consistently, and he lapsed ere long into an amiable indifferentism which to outward appearance differed but little from the indifferentism ... -- Samuel Butler
Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing. -- Samuel Butler
If the headache would only precede the intoxication, alcoholism would be a virtue. -- Samuel Butler
It is far safer to know too little than too much. People will condemn the one, though they will resent being called upon to exert themselves to follow the other. -- Samuel Butler
It is seldom very hard to do one's duty when one knows what it is, but it is often exceedingly difficult to find this out. -- Samuel Butler
Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions. -- Samuel Butler
Life is not an exact science, it is an art. -- Samuel Butler
It is not he who gains the exact point in dispute who scores most in controversy - but he who has shown the better temper. -- Samuel Butler
The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust. -- Samuel Butler
Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime -- Samuel Butler
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
Don't learn to do, but learn in doing. -- Samuel Butler
A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner, but more durable alloy. -- Samuel Butler
Life is like playing the violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on. -- Samuel Butler
We shall never get people whose time is money to take much interest in atoms. -- Samuel Butler
To do great work one must be very idle as well as very industrious. -- Samuel Butler
Adversity, if a man is set down to it by degrees, is more supportable with equanimity by most people than any great prosperity arrived at in a single lifetime. -- Samuel Butler
People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable. -- Samuel Butler
Christ was only crucified once and for a few hours. Think of the hundreds of thousands whom Christ has been crucifying in a quiet way ever since. -- Samuel Butler
Brigands will demand your money or your life, but a woman will demand both -- Samuel Butler
Be virtuous and you will be vicious. -- Samuel Butler
Look before you leap for as you sow, ye are like to reap. -- Samuel Butler
If I die prematurely I shall be saved from being bored to death at my own success. -- Samuel Butler
There is no true gracefulness which is not epitomized goodness. -- Samuel Butler
Death is only a larger kind of going abroad. -- 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
The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything. -- Samuel Butler
Conscience is thoroughly well bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it. -- Samuel Butler
You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it. -- Samuel Butler
A lawyer's dream of heaven: every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers. -- Samuel Butler
Neither have they hearts to stay, nor wit enough to run away. -- Samuel Butler
Flying. Whatever any other organism has been able to do man should surely be able to do also, though he may go a different way about it. -- Samuel Butler
Logic is like the sword
those who appeal to it shall perish by it. -- Samuel Butler
History is a bucket of ashes. -- Samuel Butler
A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog; but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide. -- Samuel Butler
To live is like to love
all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it -- Samuel Butler
A credulous mind ... finds most delight in believing
strange things, and the stranger they are the easier they pass
with him; but never regards those that are plain and
feasible, for every man can believe such. -- Samuel Butler
Our ideas are for the most part like bad sixpences, and we spend our lives trying to pass them on one another. -- Samuel Butler
The voice of the Lord is the voice of common sense, which is shared by all that is. -- 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
No miracle was effected without means of some kind; the difference between the faithful and the unbeliever consisted in the very fact that the former could see a miracle where the latter could not. The -- Samuel Butler
The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion. -- Samuel Butler
We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to them. -- Samuel Butler
The course of true anything never does run smooth. -- Samuel Butler
People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy. -- Samuel Butler
The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance. -- Samuel Butler
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
Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use. -- Samuel Butler
The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science. -- Samuel Butler
Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man. -- Samuel Butler
This is why the clergyman is so often called a vicar - he being the person whose vicarious goodness is to stand for that of those entrusted to his charge. -- Samuel Butler
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
Human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning. -- Samuel Butler
Don't learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world. -- Samuel Butler
The human intellect owes its superiority over that of the lower animals in great measure to the stimulus which alcohol has given imagination. -- Samuel Butler
It is not sufficiently considered in the hour of exultation, that all human excellence is comparative; that no man performs much but in proportion to what other accomplish, or to the time and opportunities which have been allowed him. -- Samuel Butler
People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced. -- Samuel Butler
Let every man be true and every god a liar. -- Samuel Butler
If a man knows not life which he hath seen, how shall he know death, which he hath not seen? -- Samuel Butler
The only absolute morality is absolute stagnation. -- Samuel Butler
Christ and The Church: If he were to apply for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty, adultery and desertion, he would probably get one. -- Samuel Butler
Academic and aristocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that common sense can rarely reach them. -- Samuel Butler
The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places. -- Samuel Butler
The wish to spread those opinions that we hold conducive to our own welfare is so deeply rooted in the English character that few of us can escape its influence. -- Samuel Butler
A man should have any number of little aims about which he should be conscious and for which he should have names, but he should have neither name for, nor consciousness concerning the main aim of his life. -- Samuel Butler
He was born stupid, and greatly increased his birthright. -- 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 difficult to find this out. -- Samuel Butler
God as now generally conceived of is only the last witch. -- Samuel Butler
The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered. -- Samuel Butler
When you've told someone that you've left them a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once. -- Samuel Butler
It is death, and not what comes after death, that men are generally afraid of. -- Samuel Butler
And so there is no God but has been in the loins of past gods. -- Samuel Butler
Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch a cold on overexposure. -- Samuel Butler
It stands to reason that he who would cure a moral ailment must be practically acquainted with it in all its bearings. -- Samuel Butler
Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence. -- Samuel Butler
Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness. -- Samuel Butler
Neither irony or sarcasm is argument. -- Samuel Butler
The Bible may be the truth, but it is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth. -- Samuel Butler
If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do. -- Samuel Butler
The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore. -- Samuel Butler
I really do not see much use in exalting the humble and meek; they do not remain humble and meek long when they are exalted. -- Samuel Butler
Mention but the word "divinity," and our sense of the divine is clouded. -- Samuel Butler
Truth might be heroic, but it was not within the range of practical domestic politics. -- Samuel Butler
A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words. -- Samuel Butler
Arguments are like fire-arms which a man may keep at home but should not carry about with him. -- Samuel Butler
Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such. -- Samuel Butler
A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it. -- Samuel Butler
Since God himself cannot change the past, He is obliged to tolerate the existence of historians. -- Samuel Butler
Men should not try to overstrain their goodness more than any other faculty, bodily or mental. -- Samuel Butler
How often do we not see children ruined through the virtues, real or supposed, of their parents? -- Samuel Butler
Faith - you can do very little with it, but you can do nothing without it. -- Samuel Butler
God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal. -- Samuel Butler
All truth is not to be told at all times. -- Samuel Butler
The public do not know enough to be experts, but know enough to decide between them. -- Samuel Butler
There is no such source of error as the pursuit of truth. -- Samuel Butler
Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises. -- Samuel Butler
It is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us. -- Samuel Butler
Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself. -- Samuel Butler
Man is God's highest present development. He is the latest thing in God. -- Samuel Butler
Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have. -- Samuel Butler
When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence. -- Samuel Butler
Christ: I dislike him very much. Still, I can stand him. What I cannot stand is the wretched band of people whose profession is to hoodwink us about him. -- Samuel Butler