Samuel Butler may refer to:
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.
We all love best not those who offend us least, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.
There is no true gracefulness which is not epitomized goodness.
Youth is like spring, an over praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.
The only absolute morality is absolute stagnation.
To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.
There is no bore like a clever bore.
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.
Nobody shoots at Santa Claus.
To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.
Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.
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.
Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.
God and the Devil are an effort after specialization and the division of labor.
To die completely, a person must not only forget but be forgotten, and he who is not forgotten is not dead.
In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa.
Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.
An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.
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.