Samuel Butler

It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.

Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost.

Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.

God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.

Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

Women can stand a beating except when it is with their own weapons.

Brigands demand your money or your life women require both.

The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.

A skilful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war.

Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch a cold on overexposure.

All truth is not to be told at all times.

There is no such source of error as the pursuit of truth.

The Bible may be the truth, but it is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.

For truth is precious and divine, too rich a pearl for carnal swine.

If I die prematurely I shall be saved from being bored to death at my own success.

The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

Life is not an exact science, it is an art.

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.

People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.

The seven deadly sins: Want of money, bad health, bad temper, chastity, family ties, knowing that you know things, and believing in the Christian religion.

They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?'

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.

Self-preservation is the first law of nature.

A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.