Samuel Butler

Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.

A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.

Logic is like the sword

What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, I bet that my Redeemer liveth.

The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.

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

I am not able to instruct you. I can only tell that I have chosen wrong. I have passed my time in study without experience; in the attainment of sciences which can, for the most part, be but remotely useful to mankind. I have purchased knowledge at the expense of all the common comforts of life: I have missed the endearing elegance of female friendship, and the happy commerce of domestic tenderness.

Women tell men things that they are not likely to find out for themselves.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don’t be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning Good morning at total strangers.

There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

Fierce eagles do not produce timorous doves.

Silence is the great teacher, and to learn its lessons you must pay attention to it. There is no substitute for the creative inspiration, knowledge, and stability that come from knowing how to contact your core of inner silence. The great Sufi poet Rumi wrote, Only let the moving waters calm down, and the sun and moon will be reflected on the surface of your being.

If he really thinks there is no distinction between vice and virtue, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.

I would not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.