Samuel Butler

Christ: I dislike him very much. Still, I can stand him. What I cannot stand is the wretched band of people whose profession is to hoodwink us about him.

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

A man’s friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage – but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.

If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.

Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.

It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.

In the end, only three things matter: How much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.

Not only higher forms of life but also many of the smallest insects are social beings who, without any religion, law or education, survive by mutual cooperation based on an innate recognition of their interconnectedness.

You’re just left with yourself all the time, whatever you do anyway. You’ve got to get down to your own God in your own temple. It’s all down to you, mate.

The instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.

I was kosher until I had my Bar Mitzvah, and I parlayed officially becoming a man into telling my father I wanted to eat cheeseburgers.

Inner surrender leads to the highest truth.

God is the same everywhere.

In a mind clear as still water, even the waves, breaking, are reflecting its light.

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.

Let us be grateful to Adam, our benefactor. He cut us out of the blessing of idleness and won for us the curse of labor.

Music brought me closer to the idea of God.

Still water has no mind to receive the image of the migrating geese.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought.

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first – rock and roll or Christianity.

You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child.