Quote

In practice it is seldom very hard to do one's duty when one knows what it is, but it is sometimes extremely difficult to find this out.

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
Obligation
Duty
Practice
Difficult
Find
Hard
Sometimes
Seldom
Extremely

More quotes by Samuel Butler

Image
Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds
Samuel Butler
Image
Let man be true and every god a liar.
Samuel Butler
Image
Nature. As the word is now commonly used it excludes nature's most interesting productions-the works of man. Nature is usually taken to mean mountains, rivers, clouds and undomesticated animals and plants. I am not indifferent to this half of nature, but it interests me much less than the other half.
Samuel Butler
Image
Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.
Samuel Butler
Image
Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.
Samuel Butler
Image
God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.
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
Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
Samuel Butler
Image
Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch a cold on overexposure.
Samuel Butler
Image
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.
Samuel Butler
Image
Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
Samuel Butler
Image
Friends are like money, easier made than kept.
Samuel Butler
Image
Be virtuous and you will be vicious.
Samuel Butler
Image
If I die prematurely at any rate I shall be saved from being bored to death by my own success.
Samuel Butler
Image
Arguments are like fire-arms which a man may keep at home but should not carry about with him.
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
Academic and aristocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that common sense can rarely reach them.
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
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
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.
Samuel Butler