Samuel Butler: Likeness

Samuel Butler was novelist. Explore interesting quotes on likeness.
Samuel Butler: 464 quotes13 likes

“Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.”

Samuel Butler

Thought and Word, viii
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VII - On the Making of Music, Pictures, and Books

“We take it that when the state of things shall have arrived which we have been above attempting to describe, man will have become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man. He will continue to exist, nay even to improve, and will be probably better off in his state of domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than he is in his present wild state. We treat our horses, dogs, cattle and sheep, on the whole, with great kindness, we give them whatever experience teaches us to be best for them, and there can be no doubt that our use of meat has added to the happiness of the lower animals far more than it has detracted from it; in like manner it is reasonable to suppose that the machines will treat us kindly, for their existence is as dependent upon ours as ours is upon the lower animals.”

Samuel Butler

Darwin Among the Machines
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part III - The Germs of Erewhon and of Life and Habit

“All things are like exposed photographic plates that have no visible image on them till they have been developed.”

Samuel Butler

Development
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VII - On the Making of Music, Pictures, and Books

“Youth is like spring, an overpraised season.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 6

“Sketching from nature is very like trying to put a pinch of salt on her tail. And yet many manage to do it very nicely.”

Samuel Butler

Sketching from Nature
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part IX - A Painter's Views on Painting

“They [my thoughts] are like persons met upon a journey; I think them very agreeable at first but soon find, as a rule, that I am tired of them.”

Samuel Butler

My Thoughts
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy

“A pair of lovers are like sunset and sunrise: there are such things every day but we very seldom see them.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 11

“The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.”

Samuel Butler

Public Opinions
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XVII - Material for a Projected Sequel to Alps and Sanctuaries

“The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it.”

Samuel Butler

Early Art
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part IX - A Painter's Views on Painting

“I doubt whether any angel would find me very entertaining. As for myself, if ever I do entertain one it will have to be unawares. When people entertain others without an introduction they generally turn out more like devils than angels.”

Samuel Butler

Entertaining Angels
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part X - The Position of a HomoUnius Libri

“God does not intend people, and does not like people, to be too good. He likes them neither too good nor too bad, but a little too bad is more venial with him than a little too good.”

Samuel Butler

Vice and Virtue, iii
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part II - Elementary Morality

“All thinking is of disturbance, dynamical, a state of unrest tending towards equilibrium. It is all a mode of classifying and of criticising with a view of knowing whether it gives us, or is likely to give us, pleasure or no.”

Samuel Butler

Thinking
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part V - Vibrations

“Surely the glory of finally getting rid of and burying a long and troublesome matter should be as great as that of making an important discovery. The trouble is that the coverer is like Samson who perished in the wreck of what he had destroyed; if he gets rid of a thing effectually he gets rid of himself too.”

Samuel Butler

The Art of Covery
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XI - Cash and Credit

“Sin is like a mountain with two aspects according to whether it is viewed before or after it has been reached: yet both aspects are real.”

Samuel Butler

Sin
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part II - Elementary Morality

“If people like being deceived — and this can hardly be doubted — there can rarely have been a time during which they can have had more of the wish than now. The literary, scientific and religious worlds vie with one another in trying to gratify the public.”

Samuel Butler

Populus Vult
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XII - The Enfant Terrible of Literature

“To try to live in posterity is to be like an actor who leaps over the footlights and talks to the orchestra.”

Samuel Butler

Posthumous Life, i
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XXIV - The Life of the World to Come

“A man’s style in any art should be like his dress — it should attract as little attention as possible.”

Samuel Butler

A Man's Style
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VII - On the Making of Music, Pictures, and Books

“Their view evidently was that genius was like offences--needs must that it come, but woe unto that man through whom it comes. A man’s business, they hold, is to think as his neighbours do, for Heaven help him if he thinks good what they count bad. And really it is hard to see how the Erewhonian theory differs from our own, for the word “idiot” only means a person who forms his opinions for himself.”

Samuel Butler

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 22

“As a general rule philosophy is like stirring mud or not letting a sleeping dog lie. It is an attempt to deny, circumvent or otherwise escape from the consequences of the interlacing of the roots of things with one another.”

Samuel Butler

Philosophy
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XX - First Principles

“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

Incoherency of New Ideas
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy