Samuel Butler

Logic is like the sword – those who appeal to it, shall perish by it.

To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all.

There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.

To himself everyone is an immortal. He may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

A hen is only a egg’s way of making another egg.

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

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not an example.

It always seems impossible until it is done.

A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time.

Our own life has to be our message.

Plenty of times I wanted to haul off when somebody insulted me for the color of my skin, but I had to hold to myself. I knew I was kind of an experiment. The whole thing was bigger than me.

In charity there is no excess.

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was.

Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

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

Put on the lights there, now. Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos…

These are not dark days: these are great days – the greatest days our country has ever lived.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead and not in our lifetime.