Samuel Butler

Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.

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

Look before you leap for as you sow, ye are like to reap.

Heaven is the work of the best and kindest men and women. Hell is the work of prigs, pedants and professional truth-tellers. The world is an attempt to make the best of Heaven and Hell.

The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions.

Neither have they hearts to stay, nor wit enough to run away.

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

To be a citizen in a democracy, a human being must be given a healthy start.

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

Sorrow is the rust of the soul and activity will cleanse and brighten it.

Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

Letters are like wine; if they are sound they ripen with keeping. A man should lay down letters as he does a cellar of wine.

The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

We judge of man’s wisdom by his hope.

Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light.