Quotes by Samuel Butler

“A reputation once broken may possibly be repaired, but the world will always keep their eyes on the spot where the crack was.”

“Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing.”

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

Embryos think with each stage of their development that they have now reached the only condition that really suits them. This, they say, must certainly be their last, inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock that nothing can survive it. Every change is a shock; every shock is a pro tanto death. What we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to recognize a past and a present as resembling one another.

[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind ones own, but one does not like anyone elses.

Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.

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

I remember one incident which bears upon this part of the treatise. The gentleman who gave it to me had asked to see my tobacco-pipe; he examined it carefully, and when he came to the little protuberance at the bottom of the bowl he seemed much delighted, and exclaimed that it must be rudimentary. I asked him what he meant.Sir, he answered, this organ is identical with the rim at the bottom of a cup; it is but another form of the same function. Its purposes must have been to keep the heat of the pipe from marking the table upon which it rested. You would find, if you were to look up the history of tobacco-pipes, that in early specimens this protuberance was of a different shape to what it is now. It will have been broad at the bottom, and flat, so that while the pipe was being smoked the bowl might rest upon the table without marking it. Use and disuse must have come into play and reduced the function its present rudimentary condition. I should not be surprised, sir, he continued, if, in the course of time, it were to become modified still farther, and to assume the form of an ornamental leaf or scroll, or even a butterfly, while in some cases, it will become extinct.

Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.

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.

To do great work one must be very idle as well as very industrious.

Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.

Truth might be heroic, but it was not within the range of practical domestic politics.

There are orphanages, he exclaimed to himself, for children who have lost their parents--oh! why, why, why, are there no harbours of refuge for grown men who have not yet lost them?

Parents are the last people on Earth who ought to have children.

If, again, the most superficial introspection teaches the physiologist that his conscious life is dependent upon the mechanical adjustments of his body, and that inversely his body is subjected with certain limitations to his will, then it only remains for him to make one assumption more, namely, that this mutual interdependence between the spiritual and the material is itself also dependent on law, and he has discovered the bond by which the science of the matter and the science of consciousness are united into a single whole.

Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime

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.

Every mans work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.