Samuel Butler

Virtue knows that it is impossible to get on without compromise, and tunes herself, as it were, a trifle sharp to allow for an inevitable fall in playing.

The healthy stomach is nothing if it is not conservative. Few radicals have good digestions.

Eating is touch carried to the bitter end.

Vaccination is the medical sacrament corresponding to baptism.

To himself everyone is an immortal. He may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.

We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.

Let us my friends snatch our opportunity from the passing day.

I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.

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.

Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderated use rather than total abstinence.

I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.

Many a man’s strength is in opposition, and when he faileth, he grows out of use.

The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.

Philosophers make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths, and their discourses are as the stars, which give little light because they are so high.

You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.

There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find an Englishman doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.

For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.

Even the best things are not equal to their fame.

Opinions have vested interests just as men have.

Revolutions go not backward.