Samuel Butler

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

Though wisdom cannot be gotten for gold, still less can be gotten without it.

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

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

When you have told anyone you have left him a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.

There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire absence of thought.

Be better. Be better at everything. Be better fathers… Men can be better husbands, which is – be a part of your family’s life. Do the dishes. Don’t babysit your children. You don’t babysit your own children. Be engaged. Don’t just think going to work and coming home makes you a man. Being a father, being engaged, all that stuff is important. Be a better employer. When you are sitting at a seat of power at a table of any kind and you look around you just see you, it’s just you and a bunch of men around a table, on a golf course, making deals, and you allow that to happen, and you’re okay with that – be better.

A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil that good may come of it.

One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.

The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.

Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him great.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man’s title to fame.

Passion is a sort of fever in the mind, which ever leaves us weaker than it found us.

Then spare the rod and spoil the child.

It isn’t making mistakes that’s critical; it’s correcting them and getting on with the principal task.

If you do not take control over your time and your life, other people will gobble it up. If you don’t prioritize yourself, you constantly start falling lower and lower on your list.

For who is pleased with himself.

Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.

It doesn’t matter that your dream came true if you spent your whole life sleeping.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.