Quote

God and the Devil are an effort after specialisation and division of labour.

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
Specialization
Division
Labour
Devil
Labor
Effort

More quotes by Samuel Butler

Image
The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.
Samuel Butler
Image
Life is not an exact science, it is an art.
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
When people talk of atoms obeying fixed laws, they are either ascribing some kind of intelligence and free will to atoms or they are talking nonsense. There is no obedience unless there is at any rate a potentiality of disobeying.
Samuel Butler
Image
We all love best not those who offend us least, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.
Samuel Butler
Image
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
Image
Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.
Samuel Butler
Image
Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime
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
The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.
Samuel Butler
Image
Opinions have vested interests just as men have.
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
Business should be like religion and science it should know neither love nor hate.
Samuel Butler
Image
No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.
Samuel Butler
Image
Adversity, if a man is set down to it by degrees, is more supportable with equanimity by most people than any great prosperity arrived at in a single lifetime.
Samuel Butler
Image
An obstinate man does not hold opinions, but they hold him for when he is once possessed with an error, it is, like a devil, only cast out with great difficulty.
Samuel Butler
Image
The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.
Samuel Butler
Image
Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.
Samuel Butler
Image
The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.
Samuel Butler
Image
He is greatest who is most often in men's good thoughts.
Samuel Butler