Samuel Butler may refer to:
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.
The foundations which we would dig about and find are within us, like the kingdom of heaven, rather than without.
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 sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.
The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period.
The course of true anything never does run smooth.
Be virtuous and you will be vicious.
The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.
Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?
Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule.
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.
All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.
The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.
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.
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
Nature. As the word is now commonly used it excludes nature's most interesting productions-the works of man. Nature is usually taken to mean mountains, rivers, clouds and undomesticated animals and plants. I am not indifferent to this half of nature, but it interests me much less than the other half.
Men of Science. If they are worthy of the name they are indeed about God's path and about his bed and spying out all his ways.
Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.
If I die prematurely I shall be saved from being bored to death at my own success.
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.