Samuel Butler

Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

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

Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?

Birth and death are so closely related that one could not destroy either without destroying the other at the same time. It is extinction that makes creation possible.

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

Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

I am who I am today because of the choices I made yesterday.

The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

We have a problem. Congratulations. But it’s a tough problem. Then double congratulations.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

There is something in the human spirit that will survive and prevail, there is a tiny and brilliant light burning in the heart of man that will not go out no matter how dark the world becomes.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.

At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.

Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.

It may be that we shall, by a process of sublime irony, have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.

One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.