Samuel Butler may refer to:
Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.
All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.
Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime
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.
The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.
Since God himself cannot change the past, He is obliged to tolerate the existence of historians.
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.
Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.
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.
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.
Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.
To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.
In law, nothing is certain but the expense.
A lawyer's dream of heaven: every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.
Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
To die completely, a person must not only forget but be forgotten, and he who is not forgotten is not dead.
The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.
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.
God as now generally conceived of is only the last witch.
I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.