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Danh ngôn của Samuel Butler (Sứ mệnh: 5)

Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.
To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.
Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.
God cannot alter the past, though historians can.
Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.
A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.
Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
All truth is not to be told at all times.
Human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning.
Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.
All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.
Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.
Self-preservation is the first law of nature.
Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.
If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.
Life is not an exact science, it is an art.
Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?
A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage - but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.
In law, nothing is certain but the expense.
To live is like to love - all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.
Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.
For truth is precious and divine, too rich a pearl for carnal swine.
The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions.
It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.
The history of art is the history of revivals.
The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.
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.
All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.
It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.
You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but a little want of knowledge is also a dangerous thing.
The worst thing that can happen to a man is to lose his money, the next worst his health, the next worst his reputation.
There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.
Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.
What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, I bet that my Redeemer liveth.
Vaccination is the medical sacrament corresponding to baptism. Whether it is or is not more efficacious I do not know.
The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.
Mr. Tennyson has said that more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of, but he wisely refrains from saying whether they are good or bad things.
People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.
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.
A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those worth committing.
The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.
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.