Samuel Butler

Logic is like the sword – those who appeal to it, shall perish by it.

Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.

Youth is like spring, an over-praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author’s own life into them.

Everyone should keep a mental wastepaper basket, and the older he grows, the more things will he promptly consign to it.

Men love to wonder and that is the seed of our science.

Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms.

I lose my respect for the man who can make the mystery of sex the subject of a coarse jest, yet when you speak earnestly and seriously on the subject, is silent.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen.

If a man’s wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.

I’m not concerned with your liking or disliking me. All I ask is that you respect me as a human being.

Poetry puts starch in your backbone so you can stand, so you can compose your life.

That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.

It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, Know thyself, and too often leads to a self-estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.

Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark: – I wasn’t worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.

Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.

Fortitude is the marshal of thought, the armor of the will, and the fort of reason.

Coercion is evil precisely because it…eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another.

If all you can do is crawl, start crawling.