Samuel Butler

All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.

The public do not know enough to be experts, but know enough to decide between them.

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

A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.

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.

A physician’s physiology has much the same relation to his power of healing as a cleric’s divinity has to his power of influencing conduct.

He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils: for Time is the greatest innovator: and if Time, of course, alter things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

Have good trust in yourself … not in the One that you think you should be, but in the One that you are.

All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.

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

It is natural to die as to be born.

The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.

How pleasant it is for a father to sit at his child’s board. It is like an aged man reclining under the shadow of an oak which he has planted.

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

If thou wouldn’t conquer thy weakness thou must not gratify it.

He who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.