Samuel Butler

When you’ve told someone that you’ve left them a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.

It is not he who gains the exact point in dispute who scores most in controversy – but he who has shown the better temper.

I went to the Bach Choir concert and heard Mozart’s Requiem. I did not rise warmly to it. Then I heard an extract from Parsifal which I disliked very much. If Bach wriggles, Wagner writhes…

God cannot alter the past, but historians can.

The seven deadly sins: Want of money, bad health, bad temper, chastity, family ties, knowing that you know things, and believing in the Christian religion.

The clergyman is expected to be a kind of human Sunday.

All of our actions take their hue from the complexion of the heart, as landscapes their variety from light.

A lawyers dream of heaven; every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.

Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.

As the births of living creatures, at first, are ill-shapen: so are all Innovations, which are the births of time.

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

The highest panegyric, therefore, that private virtue can receive, is the praise of servants.

He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.

You cannot run faster than a bullet.

Above all, we must avoid the pitfalls of tribalism. If we are divided among ourselves on tribal lines, we open our doors to foreign intervention and its potentially harmful consequences.

The pencil of the Holy Ghost hath labored more in describing the afflictions of Job than the felicities of Solomon.

Youth is wasted on the young.

Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.

Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Haven’t you learned yet that I put something more than whisky into my speeches.