413 Quotes by Samuel Butler

To live is like to love – all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.

Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds.

A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.

There are orphanages,” he exclaimed to himself, “for children who have lost their parents – oh! why, why, why, are there no harbours of refuge for grown men who have not yet lost them?

The major sin is the sin of being born.

Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime.

Morality is the custom of one’s country and the current feeling of one’s peers. Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country.

The evil that men do lives after them. Yes, and a good deal of the evil that they never did as well.

Can anyone do much for anyone else unless by making a will in his favour and dying then and there? Should not each look after his own happiness, and will not the world be best carried on if everyone minds his own business and leaves other people to mind theirs?