Samuel Butler

Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost.

Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.

The money men make lives after them.

Letters are like wine; if they are sound they ripen with keeping. A man should lay down letters as he does a cellar of wine.

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

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this divine glass, they see face to face; and their converse is free as well as pure. This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.

Our necessities are few, but our wants are endless.

He does not care for flowers. Calls them rubbish, and cannot tell one from another, and thinks it is superior to feel like that.

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.

Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion.

Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.

If people misunderstand you, do not worry…it is your voice that they hear, but what goes through their mind is…their own thoughts.

Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.

Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.

I didn’t find my friends; the good Lord gave them to me.

That’s what I can’t stand. I know I’ll bounce back, and that’s what I can’t stand.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

Life must be filled up, and the man who is not capable of intellectual pleasures must content himself with such as his senses can afford.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly.

Give, even if you only have little.