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Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.

Samuel Butler

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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
Men
Banality
Corny
Commonplace
Seldom
Occasions
Supreme

More quotes by Samuel Butler

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Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.
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The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.
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The history of art is the history of revivals.
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If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.
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God and the Devil are an effort after specialisation and division of labour.
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Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.
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When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.
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He was born stupid, and greatly increased his birthright.
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People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable.
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The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.
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Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds
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The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.
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When you've told someone that you've left them a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.
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[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.
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A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage - but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.
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Words are like money there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.
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The wish to spread those opinions that we hold conducive to our own welfare is so deeply rooted in the English character that few of us can escape its influence.
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Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.
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The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.
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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.
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