Samuel Butler

Youth is like spring, an over-praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?

Such as take lodgings in a head that’s to be let unfurnished.

Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch a cold on overexposure.

When you have told anyone you have left him a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.

The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

I could not find the world if I searched ten years. I’ve forgotten the road by which I came.

The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education.

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.

Drag your thoughts away from your troubles… by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.

It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.

Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.

The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.

Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.

My love for you was like a poem I wrote; one that I disregarded as average. Torn out, thrown away to the rubbish heap, waiting; wishing to be picked up and appreciated by someone else, for the masterpiece that it is.

Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged, must end in disappointment. If it be asked, what is the improper expectation which it is dangerous to indulge, experience will quickly answer, that it is such expectation as is dictated not by reason, but by desire; expectation raised, not by the common occurrences of life, but by the wants of the expectant; an expectation that requires the common course of things to be changed, and the general rules of action to be broken.

There is no daily chore so trivial that it cannot be made important by skipping it two days running.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.