Samuel Butler

Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.

A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those worth committing.

The voice of the Lord is the voice of common sense, which is shared by all that is.

The public do not know enough to be experts, but know enough to decide between them.

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

The need for change bulldozed road down the center of my mind.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

Discern of the coming on of years, and think not to do the same things still; for age will not be defied.

The teacher reminded us that Romes liberties were not auctioned off in a day, but were bought slowly, gradually, furtively, little by little; first with a little corn and oil for the exceedingly poor and wretched, later with corn and oil for voters who were not quite so poor, later still with corn and oil for pretty much every man that had a vote to sellexactly our own history over again.

There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

How can one be well…when one suffers morally?

I could have become a soldier if I had waited; I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating.

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

Who prays for Satan? Who, in 1,800 years, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?