Samuel Butler

The money men make lives after them.

Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.

Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.

Priests are not men of the world; it is not intended that they should be; and a University training is the one best adapted to prevent their becoming so.

I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.

To live is like to love – all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

Stay with me,’ he said, ‘until the sun goes out, the seas are parched, and the wind draws its last breath.

Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans –which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.

Life is largely a matter of expectation.

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

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.

It’s your life-but only if you make it so.

The painters could be identified by dirty fingernails; the writers by conversation in labored monosyllables and aggressive vulgarities which disguised their minds.

His honest, patronizing pride in the good-will and respect of everybody about him was a safeguard even against foolish romance, still more against a lower kind of folly.

Birth and death are so closely related that one could not destroy either without destroying the other at the same time. It is extinction that makes creation possible.

Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

You’ve got a big, big problem if you get caught up in what people say. If you’re gonna live for what people say, you might as well lay down and forget it. Because it doesn’t work that way.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can let alone.