Samuel Butler

The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.

It is tact that is golden, not silence.

A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it.

Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.

No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.

Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?

It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one’s own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care.

A country-bred man can always learn to get on with city people, but a town-bred fellah never gets the real hang of the country. You can put city polish on a man, but by golly, it seems you can’t ever rub it off him.

Our thinking and our behaviour are always in anticipation of a response. It is therefore fear-based.

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.

In this magical hour, as the black ink sky fades to forget-me-not grey and the Cyprus trees emerge from the shadows, I tune in to my heart. In clarity, I choose to step into freedom to bring lightness of being and to be love.

It is hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it. you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon.

The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give, for we that live to please, must please to live.

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.

Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.

If someone betrays you once, it’s their fault; if they betray you twice, it’s your fault.

Wisdom is better than silver and gold. I was hopeless, now I’m on hope road.

Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.

She has taken a patronizing fancy to her father, the Admiral, who accepts her condescension gratefully as age brings more and more home to him the futility of his social position.

Man is not weak; knowledge is more than equivalent to force.