Samuel Butler

If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.

Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.

He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

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.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.

The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

He that gives good advice builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example builds with both.

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.

The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men.

Is not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily pad floating on the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every shrub and tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit.

This is certain, that a man that studieth revenge keeps his wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well.

O imitators, you slavish herd!

The advice that is wanted is commonly not welcome and that which is not wanted, evidently an effrontery.

Passion is the mob of the man, that commits a riot upon his reason.

The gap that’s opened I’m filling with fairy dust, hues of the heart and a joy for life what was… I invite to exit right quietly, in shades of black and white.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

Your playing small does not serve the world. Who are you not to be great?

Pride is seldom delicate; it will please itself with very mean advantages.