There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire absence of thought.
Samuel Butler

There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.
Samuel Butler

There is such a thing as doing good that evil may come.
Samuel Butler

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

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.
Samuel Butler

Those who have never had a father can at any rate never know the sweets of losing one. To most men the death of his father is a new lease of life.
Samuel Butler

Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.
Samuel Butler

To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all.
Samuel Butler

To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.
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

To know God better is only to realize how impossible it is that we should ever know him at all. I know not which is more childish to deny him, or define him.
Samuel Butler

To live is like to love - all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.
Samuel Butler

Vaccination is the medical sacrament corresponding to baptism. Whether it is or is not more efficacious I do not know.
Samuel Butler

Virtue knows that it is impossible to get on without compromise, and tunes herself, as it were, a trifle sharp to allow for an inevitable fall in playing.
Samuel Butler

We all like to forgive, and love best not those who offend us least, nor who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.
Samuel Butler

We are not won by arguments that we can analyse but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself.
Samuel Butler

We shall never get people whose time is money to take much interest in atoms.
Samuel Butler

What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, I bet that my Redeemer liveth.
Samuel Butler

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

When you have told anyone you have left him a legacy, the only decent thing to do is die at once.
Samuel Butler