Samuel Butler

The history of art is the history of revivals.

The clergyman is expected to be a kind of human Sunday.

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

It is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us.

Then spare the rod and spoil the child.

Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.

No one has a prosperity so high and firm that two or three words can’t dishearten it.

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.

Nothing is black or white.

Not gold but only men can makeA people great and strong;Men who for truth and honors sakeStand fast and suffer long. Brave men who work while others sleep,Who dare while others flyThey build a nations pillars deepAnd lift them to the sky.

If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn’t be anything for us to do.

It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books nobody reads.

Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know. The persons who compose our company, converse, and come and go, and design and execute many things, and somewhat comes of it all, but an unlooked for result. The individual is always mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors, quarrelled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done; all are a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new, and very unlike what he promised himself.

Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.

To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.

How could a man be satisfied with a decision between such alternatives and under such circumstances? No more than he can be satisfied with his hat, which he’s chosen from among such shapes as the resources of the age offer him, wearing it at best with a resignation which is chiefly supported by comparison.

There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man’s self.

Keeping your body healthy is an expression of gratitude to the whole cosmos; trees, clouds, everything.