Samuel Butler

The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

We are not won by arguments that we can analyze, but by tone and temper; by the manner, which is the man himself.

The healthy stomach is nothing if it is not conservative. Few radicals have good digestions.

For every why he had a wherefore.

If there is any moral in Christianity, if there is anything to be learned from it, if the whole story is not profitless from first to last, it comes to this: that a man should back his own opinion against the world s.

In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.

What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men’s minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.

The studious class are their own victims: they are thin and pale, their feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the day a fear of interruption –pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism.

Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now.

Players, Sir! I look on them as no better than creatures set upon tables and joint stools to make faces and produce laughter, like dancing dogs.

Beware the barrenness of a busy life.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.

There are charms made only for distance admiration.

Worthless people love only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

Subdue your passion or it will subdue you.

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

A good and faithful judge ever prefers the honorable to the expedient.

Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.

The highest panegyric, therefore, that private virtue can receive, is the praise of servants.

No matter how plain a woman may be, if truth and honesty are written across her face, she will be beautiful.