Samuel Butler

Loyalty is still the same, whether it win or lose the game; true as a dial to the sun, although it be not shined upon.

Eating is touch carried to the bitter end.

Evil is like water, it abounds, is cheap, soon fouls, but runs itself clear of taint.

To himself everyone is an immortal. He may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

We are not won by arguments that we can analyze, but by tone and temper; by the manner, which is the man himself.

Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.

The best efforts of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

The mouth obeys poorly when the heart murmurs.

He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon a little.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined – to strengthen each other – to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.

If everyone is a product of this society, who will say the things that need to be said, and do the things that need to be done, without compromise?

Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.

Was there ever such an autumn? And yet there was never such a panic and hard times in the commercial world. The merchants and banks are suspending and failing all the country over, but not the sandbanks, solid and warm, and streaked with bloody blackberry vines.You may run upon them as much as you please – even as the crickets do, and find their account in it. They are the stockholders in these banks, and I hear them creaking their content.

Life is short, but there is always time for courtesy.

The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder – in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.

Ice-cream is exquisite – what a pity it isn’t illegal.

We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together, and if we are to live together we have to talk.

There are two great rules of life, the one general and the other particular. The first is that everyone can, in the end get what he wants if he only tries. This is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is more or less an exception to the general rule.

You should always own a black dress because no one ever remembers a black dress.

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

Logic is like the sword