Samuel Butler Quotes

• There are two great rules in life, the one general and the other particular. The first is that every one can in the end get what he wants if he only tries. This is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is more or less of an exception to the rule.

  Samuel Butler

  Tags in Rules

• Authority intoxicates, And makes mere sots of magistrates; The fumes of it invade the brain, And make men giddy, proud and vain: By this the fool commands the wise, The noble-with the base complies, The sot assumes the rule of wit, And cowards make t.

  Samuel Butler

  Tags in Authority

• One who is proud of ancestry is like a turnip; there is nothing good of him but that which is underground.

  Samuel Butler

  Tags in Ancestry

• Mistakes are often the stepping stones to utter failure.

  Samuel Butler

  Topics in Mistake

• The man who takes time to explain his mistakes has little time left for anything else.

  Samuel Butler

  Topics in Mistake

• We’re all proud of making little mistakes. It gives us the feeling we don’t make any big ones.

  Samuel Butler

  Topics in Mistake

• Morality turns on whether the pleasure precedes or follows the pain.

  Samuel Butler

  Tags in Morality

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

  Samuel Butler

  Tags in Morality

• God cannot alter the past, that is why he is obliged to connive at the existence of historians.

  Samuel Butler

  Topics in God

• If God wants us to do a thing, he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him.

  Samuel Butler

  Topics in God

• God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.

  Samuel Butler

  Topics in God

• Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.

  Samuel Butler

  Topics in Fear

• Genius is a nuisance, and it is the duty of schools and colleges to abate it by setting genius-traps in its way.

  Samuel Butler

  Topics in Genius

• People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and seeing it practiced.

  Samuel Butler

  Tags in Christianity

• If there is any moral in Christianity, if there is anything to be learned from it, if the whole story is not profitless from first to last, it comes to this: that a man should back his own opinion against the world’s.

  Samuel Butler

  Tags in Christianity

• If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

  Samuel Butler

  Topics in Death

• There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.

  Samuel Butler

  Topics in Death

• A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but a little want of knowledge is also a dangerous thing.

  Samuel Butler

  Topics in Knowledge

• Love is a boy, by poets styled, Then spare the rod, and spoil the child.

  Samuel Butler

  Topics in Love

• Genius is no respecter of time, trouble, money or persons, the four things around which human affairs turn most persistently.

  Samuel Butler

  Topics in Money

Samuel Butler (250)

Birth:	4th December, 1835
Death:	18th June, 1902
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Novelist, Writer

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Today's Anniversary - 11th January

Births

• 1892 - Tom Stewart
• 1842 - William James
• 1907 - Abraham Joshua Heschel
• 1971 - Mary J. Blige
• 1885 - Alice Paul

Deaths

• 2007 - Robert Anton Wilson
• 2004 - Spalding Gray
• 1928 - Thomas Hardy
• 1966 - Lal Bahadur Shastri
• 2005 - Spencer Dryden