413 Quotes by Samuel Butler

He dons are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.

Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbours, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them.

The foundations which we would dig about and find are within us, like the kingdom of heaven, rather than without.

Self-preservation is the first law of nature.

Academic and aristocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that common sense can rarely reach them.

Nobody shoots at Santa Claus.

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.

Man is God's highest present development. He is the latest thing in God.

The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable, and absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is.