Samuel Butler Quotes

Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule.

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.

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income

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

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

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.

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

Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.

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

Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.

Life is one long process of getting tired.

Prayers are to men as dolls are to children.

An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.

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.

Life is like playing the violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.

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

Logic is like the sword--those who appeal to it shall perish by it.

Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.

We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to them.

Fireflies out on a warm summer's night, seeing the urgent, flashing, yellow-white phosphorescence below them, go crazy with desire; moths cast to the winds an enchantment potion that draws the opposite sex, wings beating hurriedly, from kilometers away; peacocks display a devastating corona of blue and green and the peahens are all aflutter; competing pollen grains extrude tiny tubes that race each other down the female flower's orifice to the waiting egg below; luminescent squid present rhapsodic light shows, altering the pattern, brightness and color radiated from their heads, tentacles, and eyeballs; a tapeworm diligently lays a hundred thousand fertilized eggs in a single day; a great whale rumbles through the ocean depths uttering plaintive cries that are understood hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where another lonely behemoth is attentively listening; bacteria sidle up to one another and merge; cicadas chorus in a collective serenade of love; honeybee couples soar on matrimonial flights from which only one partner returns; male fish spray their spunk over a slimy clutch of eggs laid by God-knows-who; dogs, out cruising, sniff each other's nether parts, seeking erotic stimuli; flowers exude sultry perfumes and decorate their petals with garish ultraviolet advertisements for passing insects, birds, and bats; and men and women sing, dance, dress, adorn, paint, posture, self-mutilate, demand, coerce, dissemble, plead, succumb, and risk their lives. To say that love makes the world go around is to go too far. The Earth spins because it did so as it was formed and there has been nothing to stop it since. But the nearly maniacal devotion to sex and love by most of the plants, animals, and microbes with which we are familiar is a pervasive and striking aspect of life on Earth. It cries out for explanation. What is all this in aid of? What is the torrent of passion and obsession about? Why will organisms go without sleep, without food, gladly put themselves in mortal danger for sex? ... For more than half the history of life on Earth organisms seem to have done perfectly well without it. What good is sex?... Through 4 billion years of natural selection, instructions have been honed and fine-tuned...sequences of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, manuals written out in the alphabet of life in competition with other similar manuals published by other firms. The organisms become the means through which the instructions flow and copy themselves, by which new instructions are tried out, on which selection operates. 'The hen,' said Samuel Butler, 'is the egg's way of making another egg.' It is on this level that we must understand what sex is for. ... The sockeye salmon exhaust themselves swimming up the mighty Columbia River to spawn, heroically hurdling cataracts, in a single-minded effort that works to propagate their DNA sequences into future generation. The moment their work is done, they fall to pieces. Scales flake off, fins drop, and soon--often within hours of spawning--they are dead and becoming distinctly aromatic. They've served their purpose. Nature is unsentimental. Death is built in.

To live is like to love--all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it

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

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.

I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.

A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.

The only realism in art is of the imagination.

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

They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

Life, said Samuel Butler, is like giving a concert on the violin while learning to play the instrument—that, friends, is real wisdom.

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.

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

The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.

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

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.

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

The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.

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 …

Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it.

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.

To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know he is dead.

Young people have a marvellous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.

Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.

He that complies against his will Is of his own opinion still.

Words are clothes that thoughts wear

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.

You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.

Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.

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.

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.

To me it seems that youth is like spring, an overpraised season-- delightful if it happen to be a favoured one, but in practice very rarely favoured and more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting east winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

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.

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.

Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds

In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.

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.

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.

Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.

There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.

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.

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

People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.

The major sin is the sin of being born.

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

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

It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.

Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule. Nevertheless one had better know the rules, for they sometimes guide in doubtful cases, though not often.

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. 

In description words adhere to certain objects, and have the effect on the sense of oysters, or barnacles.

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.

Friendship is like Money; easier made than kept.

Food of Love Eating is touch carried to the bitter end. -Samuel Butler II I'm going to murder you with love; I'm going to suffocate you with embraces; I'm going to hug you, bone by bone, Till you're dead all over. Then I will dine on your delectable marrow. You will become my personal Sahara; I'll sun myself in you, then with one swallow Drain you remaining brackish well. With my female blade I'll carve my name In your most aspiring palm Before I chop it down. Then I'll inhale your last oasis whole. But in the total desert you become You'll see me stretch, horizon to horizon, Opulent mirage! Wisteria balconies dripping cyclamen. Vistas ablaze with crystal, laced in gold. So you will summon each dry grain of sand And move towards me in undulating dunes Till you arrive at sudden ultramarine: A Mediterranean to stroke your dusty shores; Obstinate verdue, creeping inland, fast renudes Your barrens; succulents spring up everywhere, Surprising life! And I will be that green. When you are fed and watered, flourishing With shoots entwining trellis, dome and spire, Till you are resurrected field in bloom, I will devour you, my natural food, My host, my final supper on the earth, And you'll begin to die again.

I want to be able to do anything with words: handle slashing, flaming descriptions like Wells, and use the paradox with the clarity of Samuel Butler, the breadth of Bernard Shaw and the wit of Oscar Wilde, I want to do the wide sultry heavens of Conrad, the rolled-gold sundowns and crazy-quilt skies of Hitchens and Kipling as well as the pastel dawns and twilights of Chesterton. All that is by way of example. As a matter of fact I am a professed literary thief, hot after the best methods of every writer in my generation.

We can never get rid of mouse-ideas completely, they keep turning up again and again, and nibble, nibble--no matter how often we drive them off. The best way to keep them down is to have a few good strong cat-ideas which will embrace them and ensure their not reappearing till they do so in another shape.

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

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

The world is naturally averse to all truth it sees or hears but swallows nonsense and a lie with greediness and gluttony.

Mention but the word "divinity," and our sense of the divine is clouded.

People are always in good company when they are doing what they really enjoy.

a man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.

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?

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.

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.

As there can be no translation from one language into another which shall not scant the meaning somewhat, or enlarge upon it, so there is no language which can render thought without a jarring and a harshness somewhere.

All our lives long, every day and every hour, we are engaged in the process of accommodating our changed and unchanged selves to changed and unchanged surroundings: living, in fact, is nothing else than this process of accommodation; when we fail in it a little we are stupid, when flagrantly we are mad, when we give up the attempt altogether we die, when we suspend it temporarily we sleep.

I suppose in reality not a leaf goes yellow in autumn without ceasing to care about its sap and making the parent tree very uncomfortable by long growling and grumbling - but surely nature might find some less irritating way of carrying on business if she would give her mind to it. Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow, but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before it began to live consciously on its own account?

I know not why, but all the noblest arts hold in perfection but for a very little moment. They soon reach a height from which they begin to decline, and when they have begun to decline it is a pity that they cannot be knocked on the head; for an art is like a living organism—better dead than dying.

I have never written on any subject unless I believed that the authorities on it were hopelessly wrong.

It is tact that is golden, not silence.

It stands to reason that he who would cure a moral ailment must be practically acquainted with it in all its bearings.

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.

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.

Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances. Even if they are unhappy - very unhappy - it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from finding it out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness. To parents who wish to lead a quiet life I would say: Tell your children that they are naughty - much naughtier than most children. Point to the young people of some acquaintances as models of perfection and impress your own children with a deep sense of their own inferiority. You carry so many more guns than they do that they cannot fight you. This is called moral influence, and it will enable you to bounce them as much as you please. They think you know and they will not have yet caught you lying often enough to suspect that you are not the unworldly and scrupulously truthful person which you represent yourself to be; nor yet will they know how great a coward you are, nor how soon you will run away if they fight you with persistency and judgment. You keep the dice and throw them both for your children and yourself. Load them then, for you can easily manage to stop your children from examining them. Tell them how singularly indulgent you are; insist on the incalculable benefit you conferred upon them, firstly in bringing them into the world at all, but more particularly in bringing them into it as your own children rather than anyone else's... You hold all the trump cards, or if you do not you can filch them; if you play them with anything like judgment you will find yourselves heads of happy, united, God-fearing families... True, your children will probably find out all about it some day, but not until too late to be of much service to them or inconvenience to yourself.

For society indeed of all sorts, except of course that of a few intimate friends, he had an unconquerable aversion. "I always did hate those people," he said, "and they always have hated and always will hate me. I am an Ihsmael by instinct as much as by accident of circumstances, but if I keep out of society I shall be less vulnerable than Ishmaels generally are. The moment a man goes into society, he becomes vulnerable all round.

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.

Pleasure, after all, is a safer guide than either right or duty. For hard as it is to know what gives us pleasure, right and duty are often still harder to distinguish and, if we go wrong with them, will lead us into just as sorry a plight as a mistaken opinion concerning pleasure. When men burn their fingers through following after pleasure they find out their mistake and get to see where they have gone wrong more easily than when they have burnt them through following after a fancied duty, or a fancied idea concerning right virtue. The devil, in fact, when he dresses himself in angel's clothes, can only be detected by experts of exceptional skill, and so often does he adopt this disguise that it is hardly safe to be seen talking to an angel at all, and prudent people will follow after pleasure as a more homely but more respectable and on the whole much more trustworthy guide.

Apollodorus, the leading classical authority on Greek myths, records a tradition that the real scene of the poem was the Sicilian seaboard, and in 1896 Samuel Butler, the author of Erewhon, came independently to the same conclusion. He suggested that the poem, as we now have it, was composed at Drepanum, the modern Trapani, in Western Sicily, and that the authoress was the girl self-portrayed as Nausicaa. None of his classical contemporaries, for whom Homer was necessarily both blind and bearded, deigned to pay Butler’s theory the least attention; and since he had, as we now know, dated the poem some three hundred years too early and not explained how a Sicilian princess could have passed off her saga as Homer’s, his two books on the subject are generally dismissed as a good-humoured joke. Nevertheless, while working on an explanatory dictionary of Greek myths, I found Butler’s arguments for a Western Sicilian setting and for a female authorship irrefutable. I could not rest until I had written this novel. It re-creates, from internal and external evidence, the circumstances which induced Nausicaa to write the Odyssey, and suggest how, as an honorary Daughter of Homer, she managed to get it included in the official canon. Here is the story of a high-spirited and religious-minded Sicilian girl who saves her father’s throne from usurpation, herself from a distasteful marriage, and her two younger brothers from butchery by boldly making things happen, instead of sitting still and hoping for the best.

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.