"Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises."
Samuel ButlerTiny Panda Quotes
Quotes by Samuel Butler
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"The history of art is the history of revivals."
Samuel Butler"All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it."
Samuel Butler"People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect."
Samuel Butler"Oaths are but words, and words are but wind."
Samuel Butler"To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead."
Samuel Butler"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"Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on."
Samuel Butler"Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself."
Samuel Butler"Friendship is like money, easier made than kept."
Samuel Butler"Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children."
Samuel Butler"God cannot alter the past, though historians can."
Samuel Butler"The worst thing that can happen to a man is to lose his money, the next worst his health, the next worst his reputation."
Samuel Butler"A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those worth committing."
Samuel Butler"To live is like to love - all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it."
Samuel Butler"Life is not an exact science, it is an art."
Samuel Butler"Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it."
Samuel Butler"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"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"It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all."
Samuel Butler"Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only."
Samuel Butler"All truth is not to be told at all times."
Samuel Butler"Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well."
Samuel Butler"In law, nothing is certain but the expense."
Samuel Butler"A physician's physiology has much the same relation to his power of healing as a cleric's divinity has to his power of influencing conduct."
Samuel Butler"Vaccination is the medical sacrament corresponding to baptism. Whether it is or is not more efficacious I do not know."
Samuel Butler"Human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning."
Samuel Butler"A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg."
Samuel Butler"Self-preservation is the first law of nature."
Samuel Butler