Samuel Butler

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

God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.

Silence is not always tact, but it is tact that is golden, not silence.

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.

I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.

Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.

A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.

Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.

There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought -a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

The nearest way to glory is to strive to be what you wish to be thought to be.

Man is God’s highest present development. He is the latest thing in God.

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

Think with your whole body.

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.

We estimate the wisdom of nations by seeing what they did with their surplus capital.

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.

Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

So I became a newspaperman. I hated to do it but I couldnt find honest employment.