Samuel Butler

I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.

Rare virtues are like rare plants or animals, things that have not been able to hold their own in the world. A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner but more durable metal.

Such as take lodgings in a head that’s to be let unfurnished.

No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.

Every one is a genius, more or less. No one is so physically sound that no part of him will be even a little unsound, and no one is so diseased but that some part of him will be healthy — so no man is so mentally and morally sound, but that he will be in part both mad and wicked; and no man is so mad and wicked but he will be sensible and honourable in part. In like manner there is no genius who is not also a fool, and no fool who is not also a genius.

A skilful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war.

Fortune knocks at every man’s door once in a life, but in a good many cases the man is in a neighboring saloon and does not hear her.

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.

Less judgment than wit is more sail than ballast.

Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party.

If you want to reach a state of bliss, then go beyond your ego and the internal dialogue. Make a decision to relinquish the need to control, the need to be approved, and the need to judge. Those are the three things the ego is doing all the time. It’s very important to be aware of them every time they come up.

The safest course is to do nothing against one’s conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.

Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.

Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

If you are in a poker game and after 20 minutes you don’t know who the patsy is, then you’re the patsy.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves…