Samuel Butler

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

Though wisdom cannot be gotten for gold, still less can be gotten without it.

Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.

People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy.

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

In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.

The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society.

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.

Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.

There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless. Observe the ass, for instance: his character is about perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler animals, yet see what ridicule has brought him to. Instead of feeling complimented when we are called an ass, we are left in doubt.

Slavery it is that makes slavery; freedom, freedom. The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?

Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world alters the world.

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party.

Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

The fibers of all things have their tension and are strained like the strings of an instrument.

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.

Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.