Samuel Butler

Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it.

Life is one long process of getting tired.

The money men make lives after them.

Loyalty is still the same, whether it win or lose the game; true as a dial to the sun, although it be not shined upon.

The thief. Once committed beyond a certain point he should not worry himself too much about not being a thief any more. Thieving is God’s message to him. Let him try and be a good thief.

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.

Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.

I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know, I’ve done it a thousand times.

We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves…

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

There is always a best way of doing everything.

He that pursues fame with just claims, trusts his happiness to the winds; but he that endeavors after it by false merit, has to fear, not only the violence of the storm, but the leaks of his vessel.

Human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning.

People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy.

I am certainly not one of those who need to be prodded. In fact, if anything, I am the prod.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

Be ever on your guard what you say of anybody and to whom.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

Put on the lights there, now. Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos…

He who praises every body, praises nobody.