Samuel Butler

A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those worth committing.

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

Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.

Youth is like spring, an over-praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

All truth is not to be told at all times.

Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.

There’s much more stupidity than there is malice in the world.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.

We must train hard. It’s not about denying a weakness may exist but about denying its right to persist.

Letting go is not giving up.

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.

Only poetry inspires poetry.

A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.

Hasty resolutions are of the nature of vows, and to be equally avoided

The test of a man or woman’s breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

The measure of a great leader, is their success in bringing everyone around to their opinion twenty years later.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

There is a hush over all Europe, nay, over all the world. Alas! it is the hush of suspense, and in many lands it is the hush of fear. Listen! No, listen carefully, I think I hear somethingyes, there it was quite clear. Dont you hear it? It is the tramp of armies crunching the gravel of the paradegrounds, splashing through rain-soaked fields, the tramp of two million German soldiers and more than a million Italiansgoing on maneuversyes, only on maneuvers!

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