Samuel Butler Life Quotations

Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.

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

Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule.

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

Life is not an exact science, it is an art.

Life is one long process of getting tired.

Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.

The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

An empty house is like a stray dog or a body from which life has departed.

A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.

All of the animals except for man know that the principle business of life is to enjoy it.

Whereas, to borrow an illustration from mathematics, life was formerly an equation of, say, 100 unknown quantities, it is now one of 99 only, inasmuch as memory and heredity have been shown to be one and the same thing.