Samuel Butler quotes | Thousands Of Quotes

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Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost.

Logic is like the sword - those who appeal to it, shall perish by it.

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.

We all like to forgive, and love best not those who offend us least, nor who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.

Samuel Butler

Love

There is no such source of error as the pursuit of truth.

All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.

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

Samuel Butler

People

Common sense

The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

Samuel Butler

Virtue

Vice

The dead should be judged like criminals, impartially, but they should be allowed the benefit of the doubt.

Samuel Butler

Doubt

The Bible may be the truth, but it is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.

Samuel Butler

Lying

To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.

The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.

Samuel Butler

Old

All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.

Samuel Butler

Home

Nonsense

There is no true gracefulness which is not epitomized goodness.

Samuel Butler

Goodness