413 Quotes by Samuel Butler

A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.

I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.

In old times people used to try and square the circle; now they try and devise schemes for satisfying the Irish nation.

If I die prematurely I shall be saved from being bored to death at my own success.

And like a lobster boiled, the morn From black to red began to turn

Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.

A skilful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war.

The clergyman is expected to be a kind of human Sunday.

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