Samuel Butler

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

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

Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.

Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.

Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?

I went to the Bach Choir concert and heard Mozart’s Requiem. I did not rise warmly to it. Then I heard an extract from Parsifal which I disliked very much. If Bach wriggles, Wagner writhes…

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

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

A man cannot free himself by any self-denying ordinances, neither by water nor potatoes, nor by violent possibilities, by refusing to swear, refusing to pay taxes, by going to jail, or by taking another man’s crops or squatting on his land. By none of these ways can he free himself; no, nor by paying his debts with money; only by obedience to his own genius.

It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.

The faith that stands on authority is not faith.

There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.

The mind is refrigerated by interruption; the thoughts are diverted from the principal subject; the reader is weary, he suspects not why; and at last throws away the book, which he has too diligently studied.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

Be careful the friends you choose for you will become like them.

He that outlives a wife whom he has long loved, sees himself disjoined from the only mind that has the same hopes, and fears, and interest; from the only companion with whom he has shared much good and evil; and with whom he could set his mind at liberty, to retrace the past or anticipate the future. The continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless.

Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you.

Whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it.

Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.

Don’t learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world.

When the eye is not set on one leaf and you face the tree with nothing in mind, any number of leaves are visible to the eye.