Samuel Butler

The Bible may be the truth, but it is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

The history of art is the history of revivals.

He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most. God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us.

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.

To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all.

It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.

The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society.

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life;

It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances.

The only thing grief as taught me is to know how shallow it is.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

Every man will be a poet if he can; otherwise a philosopher or man of science. This proves the superiority of the poet.

Sir, I have no objection to a man’s drinking wine, if he can do it in moderation. I found myself apt to go to excess in it, and therefore, after having been for some time without it, on account of illness, I thought it better not to return to it. Every man is to judge for himself, according to the effects which he experiences.

The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him.

You cannot be a hero without being a coward.

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: “O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.” And God granted it.

The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend.

I know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, or thoughts are affection; and am sensible of certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is no part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you.

Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.

Friendship increases in visiting friends, but in visiting them seldom.