Samuel Butler

Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.

The dead should be judged like criminals, impartially, but they should be allowed the benefit of the doubt.

Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.

Christ and The Church: If he were to apply for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty, adultery and desertion, he would probably get one.

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 great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large mattertis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

The never-ending task of self improvement.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

Esther liked books out where everyone could see them, a sort of graphic index to the intricate labyrinth of her mind arrayed to impress the most casual guest, a system of immediate introduction which she had found to obtain in a number of grimy intellectual households in Greenwich Village.

Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.

What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.

Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.

There is a hush over all Europe, nay, over all the world. Alas! it is the hush of suspense, and in many lands it is the hush of fear. Listen! No, listen carefully, I think I hear somethingyes, there it was quite clear. Dont you hear it? It is the tramp of armies crunching the gravel of the paradegrounds, splashing through rain-soaked fields, the tramp of two million German soldiers and more than a million Italiansgoing on maneuversyes, only on maneuvers!

We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men – that is genius.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

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

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all the management of human affairs.

We’re comic. We’re all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.