Top Ten Best Samuel Butler [Novelist] Quotes & Written Works

The Top Ten
1 The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.
2 A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.
3 Is there any religion whose followers can be pointed to as distinctly more amiable&trustworthy than those of any other?...I find the nicest&best people generally profess no religion at all,but are ready to like the best men of all religions.
4 Words,words,words,are the stumbling-blocks in the way of truth.Until you think of things as they are,¬ of the words that misrepresent them,you cannot think rightly.Words produce the appearance of hard&fast lines where there are none.
5 Words divide; thus we call this a man, that an ape, that a monkey, while they are all only differentiations of the same thing. To think of a thing they must be got rid of: they are the clothes that thoughts wear — only the clothes.
6 ..there is nothing of more importance.Other men's words will stop you at..beginning of an investigation.A man may play with words all his life,arranging..&rearranging them like dominoes.If I could think to you without words you would understand me better.
7 The great characters of fiction live as truly as the memories of dead men. For the life after death it is not necessary that a man or woman should have lived.
8 Every new idea has something of the pain and peril of childbirth about it; ideas are just as mortal and just as immortal as organised beings are.
9 If people were to demand cash payment in irrefragable certainty for everything..they have taken hitherto as paper money on the credit of the bank of public opinion,is there money enough behind it all to stand so great a drain even on so great a reserve?
10 It is love that alone gives life,&the truest life is..we live not in ourselves but vicariously in others,&with which we have no concern.Our concern is so to order ourselves that we may be of..number of them that enter into life—although we know it not.
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