Samuel Butler

A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog; but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide.

For every why he had a wherefore.

The thief. Once committed beyond a certain point he should not worry himself too much about not being a thief any more. Thieving is God’s message to him. Let him try and be a good thief.

Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.

Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?

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 louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

I could not find the world if I searched ten years. I’ve forgotten the road by which I came.

Do that which is assigned to you and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights…sexual intercourse!…His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he does not.

Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.

Whatever you have spend less.

Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

What contemptible scoundrel has stolen the cork to my lunch?

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.

We don’t want people to have expectations of us, but then we have expectations of everybody else.

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.