It is hard enough to know whether one is happy or unhappy now, and still harder to compare the relative happiness or unhappiness of different times of one’s life; the utmost that can be said is that we are fairly happy so long as we are not distinctly aware of being miserable.

— Samuel Butler

Samuel Butler Quotes

Can anyone do much for anyone else unless by making a will in his favour and dying then and there? Should not each look after his own happiness, and will not the world be best carried on if everyone minds his own business and leaves other people to mind theirs?

— Samuel Butler

To me it seems that those who are happy in this world are better and more lovable people than those who are not.

— Samuel Butler

A man at five and thirty should no more regret not having had a happier childhood than he should regret not having been born a prince of the blood.

— Samuel Butler

The evil that men do lives after them. Yes, and a good deal of the evil that they never did as well.

— Samuel Butler

Morality is the custom of one’s country and the current feeling of one’s peers. Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country.

— Samuel Butler

It is hard enough to know whether one is happy or unhappy now, and still harder to compare the relative happiness or unhappiness of different times of one’s life; the utmost that can be said is that we are fairly happy so long as we are not distinctly aware of being miserable.

— Samuel Butler

Conscience is thoroughly well bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it.

— Samuel Butler

If it was not such an awful thing to say of anyone, I should say that she meant well.

— Samuel Butler

An open mind is all very well in its way, but it ought not to be so open that there is no keeping anything in or out of it. It should be capable of shutting its doors sometimes, or it may be found a little drafty.

— Samuel Butler

A man’s friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage – but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends. The rift in friendship which invariably makes its appearance on the marriage of either of the parties to it was fast widening, as it no less invariably does, into the great gulf which is fixed between the married and the unmarried, and I was beginning to leave my protege to a fate with which I had neither right nor power to meddle.

— Samuel Butler

Embryo minds, like embryo bodies, pass through a number of strange metamorphoses before they adopt their final shape.

— Samuel Butler

If a person would understand either the Odyssey or any other ancient work, he must never look at the dead without seeing the living in them, nor at the living without thinking of the dead. We are too fond of seeing the ancients as one thing and the moderns as another.

— Samuel Butler

An idea must not be condemned for being a little shy and incoherent; all new ideas are shy when introduced first among our old ones. We should have patience and see whether the incoherency is likely to wear off or to wear on, in which latter case the sooner we get rid of them the better.

— Samuel Butler

Moral influence means persuading another that one can make that other more uncomfortable than that other can make oneself.

— 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, and the more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly will his character appear in spite of him.

— Samuel Butler

I firmly believe that the same thing would happen in nine families out of ten if the parents were merely to remember how they felt when they were young, and actually to behave towards their children as they would have had their own parents behave towards themselves. But this, which would appear to be so simple and obvious, seems also to be a thing which not one in a hundred thousand is able to put in practice.

— Samuel Butler

He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still.

— Samuel Butler

For property is robbery, but then, we are all robbers or would-be robbers together, and have found it essential to organise our thieving, as we have found it necessary to organise our lust and revenge. Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.

— Samuel Butler

Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.

— Samuel Butler

When I’m long dead and gone, people will be falsely attributing made-up quotes to me on internet pages and memes.

— Samuel Butler
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