Samuel Butler

Silence is not always tact, but it is tact that is golden, not silence.

Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.

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

A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it.

If God wants us to do a thing, he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him.

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

You are all fundamentalists with a top dressing of science. That is why you are the stupidest of conservatives and reactionists in politics and the most bigoted of obstructionists in science itself. When it comes to getting a move on you are all of the same opinion: stop it, flog it, hang it, dynamite it, stamp it out.

Give me insight into today and you may have the antique and future worlds.

What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

Europe extends to the Alleghenies; America lies beyond.

The connection between us runs so strong and deep. It’s like a steel cable stretching across the ocean bed, so many fathoms below, that even the most skilled and courageous of deep sea divers cannot reach it to cut it. It remains strong, silent, invisible, invincible.

Glances of true beauty can be seen in the faces of those who live in true meekness.

How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible.

The receipts of cookery are swelled to a volume; but a good stomach excels them all.

It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.

It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Work is always an antidote to depression.

More knowledge may be gained of a man’s real character by a short conversation with one of his servants than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree and ended with his funeral.

So of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more it remains.