413 Quotes by Samuel Butler

To me it seems that those who are happy in this world are better and more lovable people than those who are not.

They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, ‘Can he name a kitten?’

A man at five and thirty should no more regret not having had a happier childhood than he should regret not having been born a prince of the blood.

A man’s friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage – but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.

No boy can resist being fed well by a good-natured and still handsome woman. Boys are very like nice dogs in this respect – give them a bone and they will like you at once.

Mention but the word “divinity,” and our sense of the divine is clouded.

Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself, and the more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly will his character appear in spite of him.

A man’s friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage – but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends. The rift in friendship which invariably makes its appearance on the marriage of either of the parties to it was fast widening, as it no less invariably does, into the great gulf which is fixed between the married and the unmarried, and I was beginning to leave my protege to a fate with which I had neither right nor power to meddle.

I firmly believe that the same thing would happen in nine families out of ten if the parents were merely to remember how they felt when they were young, and actually to behave towards their children as they would have had their own parents behave towards themselves. But this, which would appear to be so simple and obvious, seems also to be a thing which not one in a hundred thousand is able to put in practice.