Samuel Butler

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

Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.

There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.

The voice of the Lord is the voice of common sense, which is shared by all that is.

It is tact that is golden, not silence.

We are not won by arguments that we can analyze, but by tone and temper; by the manner, which is the man himself.

Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.

Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman’s life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul’s highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills.

In this country it is a good thing to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.

I trust no one, not even myself.

Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature – if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you – know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse.

A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat; self-control is the rule.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most. On Other Peoples Expectations: The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor; he took my measurement anew every time he saw me, while all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.