Samuel Butler

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.

It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.

The advantage of doing one’s praising to oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.

Look before you leap for as you sow, ye are like to reap.

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

Letters are like wine; if they are sound they ripen with keeping. A man should lay down letters as he does a cellar of wine.

I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.

The law of God, as quite plainly expressed in woman’s construction, is this: There shall be no limit put upon your intercourse with the other sex sexually, at any time of life. During twenty-three days in every month (in the absence of pregnancy) from the time a woman is seven years old till she dies of old age, she is ready for action, and competent. As competent as the candlestick is to receive the candle. Competent every day, competent every night. Also, she wants that candle – yearns for it, longs for it, hankers after it, as commanded by the law of God in her heart.

When one person suffers from a delusion It is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion It is called Religion.

If something is easy for you, work on it a little. If it’s hard for you, work on it a lot.

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

It is easy to believe we are each waves and forget we are also the ocean.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

Buddhist practice is simply a system directed to the one end of lessening the suffering of life.

Right now, it’s like this.

Christianity is the highest perfection of humanity.

It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

I take the kids to church and Sunday school. They love it. I really think it’s important for a child to feel that there are things that are bigger than your life out there.

We are desire. It is the essence of the human Soul, the secret of our existence. Absolutely nothing of human greatness is ever accomplished without it. Not a symphony has been written, a mountain climbed, an injustice fought, or a love sustained apart from desire. Desire fuels our search for the life we prize. – John Elderidge