Samuel Butler

To know God better is only to realize how impossible it is that we should ever know him at all. I know not which is more childish to deny him, or define him.

Eating is touch carried to the bitter end.

There is no such source of error as the pursuit of truth.

Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.

The history of art is the history of revivals.

It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.

Begin, be bold and venture to be wise.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

When you know to laugh and when to look upon things as too absurd to take seriously, the other person is ashamed to carry through even if he was serious about it.

I know not any thing more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed.

It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.

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

They change their climate, not their soul, who rush across the sea.

Society is a hospital of incurables.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

Make a good use of the present.

As the physically weak man can make himself strong by careful and patient training, so the man of weak thoughts can make them strong by exercising himself in right thinking.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.