Samuel Butler

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.

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

There are two great rules of life, the one general and the other particular. The first is that everyone can, in the end get what he wants if he only tries. This is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is more or less an exception to the general rule.

It is tact that is golden, not silence.

Those who have never had a father can at any rate never know the sweets of losing one. To most men the death of his father is a new lease of life.

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

We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life — some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed — because all their teaching has been, that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this defense against passionate affliction even more than men.

All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of story-tellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

How can what an Englishman believes be hearsay? It is a contradiction in terms.

It is tact that is golden, not silence.

My dear friend, clear your mind of cant [excessive thought]. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, Sir, I am your most humble servant. You are not his most humble servant. You may say, These are bad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times. You don’t mind the times … You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society; but don’t think foolishly.

Philosophy when superficially studied, excites doubt, when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

You don’t create things, you discover things.

Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder’s moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a priveleged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.