Quotes by Samuel Butler with progress

Samuel Butler

Samuel Butler

English poet

Lived from: 1835 - 1902

Category: Writers (Contemporary) Country: FlagUnited Kingdom

Born: 4 december 1835 Died: 18 june 1902

  • There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.
  • Life is like playing the violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
  • 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.
  • We are not won by arguments that we can analyze, but by tone and temper; by the manner, which is the man himself.
  • I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.
  • An empty house is like a stray dog or a body from which life has departed.
  • It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.
  • Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderated use rather than total abstinence.
  • The thief. Once committed beyond a certain point he should not worry himself too much about not being a thief any more. Thieving is God's message to him. Let him try and be a good thief.
  • Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbors, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them.
  • The voice of the Lord is the voice of common sense, which is shared by all that is.
  • 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.
  • Logic is like the sword - those who appeal to it, shall perish by it.
  • To live is like to love-all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.
  • To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all.
  • It is immoral to get drunk because the headache comes after the drinking, but if the headache came first and the drunkenness afterwards, it would be moral to get drunk.
  • One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once.
  • Birth and death are so closely related that one could not destroy either without destroying the other at the same time. It is extinction that makes creation possible.
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  • All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
    ― Samuel Butler
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  • For most men, and most circumstances, pleasure - tangible material prosperity in this world - is the safest test of virtue. Progress has ever been through the pleasures rather than through the extreme sharp virtues, and the most virtuous have leaned to excess rather than to asceticism.
    ― Samuel Butler
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