Samuel Butler

If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.

The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.

All truth is not to be told at all times.

The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.

God cannot alter the past, but historians can.

Compound for sins they are inclined to by damning those they have no mind to.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.

If it matters, it will hurt like knives or wrap and lift you in the most immeasurable joy. Or both. One thing is certain, you will feel intensely alive.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

There can be no friendship where there is no freedom. Friendship loves a free air, and will not be fenced up in straight and narrow enclosures.

All personal achievement starts in the mind of the individual. Your personal achievement starts in your mind. The first step is to know exactly what your problem, goal or desire is.

There is no such whetstone, to sharpen a good wit and encourage a will to learning, as is praise.

Let your character be kept up the very end, just as it began, and so be consistent.

It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

Better see rightly on a pound a week than squint on a million.

We do what we must, and call it by the best names.

A good scare is worth more than good advice.

Intellectual work is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.

The desire of excessive power caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge caused men to fall.