Quote

Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.

Samuel Butler

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Samuel Butler
Age: 66 †
Born: 1835
Born: December 4
Died: 1902
Died: June 18
Farmer
Novelist
Painter
Photographer
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Translator
Writer
Notts
Cellarius
Aim
Main
Learned
Crazy
Enjoy
Never
Life
People
Aims

More quotes by Samuel Butler

Image
It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.
Samuel Butler
Image
Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.
Samuel Butler
Image
A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.
Samuel Butler
Image
They say the test of [literary power] is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, Can he name a kitten? And by this test I am condemned, for I cannot.
Samuel Butler
Image
Man is God's highest present development. He is the latest thing in God.
Samuel Butler
Image
Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better.
Samuel Butler
Image
Justice is my being allowed to do whatever I like. Injustice is whatever prevents my doing so.
Samuel Butler
Image
The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.
Samuel Butler
Image
A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.
Samuel Butler
Image
Business should be like religion and science it should know neither love nor hate.
Samuel Butler
Image
Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.
Samuel Butler
Image
It seems to be the fate of man to seek all his consolations in futurity. The time present is seldom able to fill desire or imagination with immediate enjoyment, and we are forced to supply its deficiencies by recollection or anticipation.
Samuel Butler
Image
The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.
Samuel Butler
Image
Whereas, to borrow an illustration from mathematics, life was formerly an equation of, say, 100 unknown quantities, it is now one of 99 only, inasmuch as memory and heredity have been shown to be one and the same thing.
Samuel Butler
Image
Mr. Tennyson has said that more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of, but he wisely refrains from saying whether they are good or bad things.
Samuel Butler
Image
To die completely, a person must not only forget but be forgotten, and he who is not forgotten is not dead.
Samuel Butler
Image
God and the Devil are an effort after specialisation and division of labour.
Samuel Butler
Image
The human intellect owes its superiority over that of the lower animals in great measure to the stimulus which alcohol has given imagination.
Samuel Butler
Image
Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.
Samuel Butler
Image
Since God himself cannot change the past, He is obliged to tolerate the existence of historians.
Samuel Butler