Samuel Butler

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.

What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, I bet that my Redeemer liveth.

It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.

I believe that he was really sorry that people would not believe he was sorry that he was not more sorry.

I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.

The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.

The future is purchased by the present.

The Country is both the Philosopher’s Garden and his Library, in which he Reads and Contemplates the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God.

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

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.

The Irish are a fair people: They never speak well of one another.

Beware the barrenness of a busy life.

True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism.

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature.

All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.