Samuel Butler

Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.

A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog; but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide.

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

Justice is my being allowed to do whatever I like. Injustice is whatever prevents my doing so.

Everyone should keep a mental wastepaper basket, and the older he grows, the more things will he promptly consign to it.

I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.

You sold me a dream and it shattered. I didn’t know how to put it back together again. So instead, I’m lovingly gluing those fragments anew with seams of gold, creating a vibrant new dream, rendering the broken strong and more than ever, breathtakingly beautiful.

Men who for truth and honor’s sake stand fast and suffer long. Brave men who work while others sleep. Who dare while others fly.They build a nation’s pillars deep. And lift them to the sky.

We are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time or interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift, our personal association, which means so much to them, we give grudgingly.

Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.

As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

Thinking will not overcome fear but action will.

True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.

Just do what works for you, because there will always be someone who think diffenrently…

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly-full of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.

Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all the time thing. You don’t win once in a while… you don’t do things right once in a while… you do them right all the time. Winning is habit.

We are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

The man who can make hard things easy is the educator.

Words are but the signs of ideas.