Samuel Butler

The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.

Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.

Life is not an exact science, it is an art.

The public do not know enough to be experts, but know enough to decide between them.

It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

It is immoral to get drunk because the headache comes after the drinking, but if the headache came first and the drunkenness afterwards, it would be moral to get drunk.

I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the rest.

Silence is the virtue of fools.

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.

Nothing is more important than reconnecting with your bliss. Nothing is as rich. Nothing is more real.

So many fail because they don’t get started – they don’t go. They don’t overcome inertia. They don’t begin.

The true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking. The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by, and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active; the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes from the talk.

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

Suppose the world were only one of God’s jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.