Samuel Butler

It is tact that is golden, not silence.

We all like to forgive, and love best not those who offend us least, nor who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.

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.

There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire absence of thought.

People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy.

Logic is like the sword – those who appeal to it, shall perish by it.

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.

The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.

Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favor. She imagines herself not only certain of accomplishing every adventure, but of obtaining those rewards which the accomplishment may deserve. She is not easily persuaded to believe that the force of merit can be resisted by obstinacy and avarice, or its luster darkened by envy and malignity.

All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.

A man thinks as well through his legs and arms as this brain.

Life is not a spectator sport. If you’re going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you’re wasting your life.

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.

If a man’s wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.

Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

Only a stomach that rarely feels hungry scorns common things.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.