Samuel Butler

Every one is a genius, more or less. No one is so physically sound that no part of him will be even a little unsound, and no one is so diseased but that some part of him will be healthy — so no man is so mentally and morally sound, but that he will be in part both mad and wicked; and no man is so mad and wicked but he will be sensible and honourable in part. In like manner there is no genius who is not also a fool, and no fool who is not also a genius.

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

For most men, and most circumstances, pleasure –tangible material prosperity in this world -is the safest test of virtue. Progress has ever been through the pleasures rather than through the extreme sharp virtues, and the most virtuous have leaned to excess rather than to asceticism.

It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.

Evil is like water, it abounds, is cheap, soon fouls, but runs itself clear of taint.

Birth and death are so closely related that one could not destroy either without destroying the other at the same time. It is extinction that makes creation possible.

Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds.

Our own life has to be our message.

Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.

The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.

Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.

I am a child of the House of Commons. I was brought up in my fathers house to believe in democracy. Trust the peoplethat was his message.

You can often change your circumstances by changing your attitude.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

He who is taught to live upon little owes more to his father’s wisdom than he who has a great deal left to him owes to his father’s care.

Some people wave their dogmatic thinking until their own reason is entangled.

Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.

Once you truly understand that it is okay to lose or fail, you are free, you have nothing to fear, and only then, can nothing in this world hold you back.

Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost.