Samuel Butler

It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.

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.

All truth is not to be told at all times.

People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable.

Science, after all, is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance.

Look before you leap for as you sow, ye are like to reap.

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.

Everyone has the right to be stupid on occasion, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege.

By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.

The greatest homage we can pay truth is to use it.

My finger can point to the moon, but my finger is not the moon. You don’t have to become my finger, nor do you have to worship my finger. You have to forget my finger, and look at where it is pointing.

My life has been one great big joke, a dance that’s walked a song that’s spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.

The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

All that I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

The line of beauty is the line of perfect economy.

He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust

Wise men make more opportunities than they find.

Regardless of who you are or what you have been, you can be what you want to be.