Samuel Butler

“A credulous mind . . . finds most delight in believingstrange things, and the stranger they are the easier they passwith him; but never regards those that are plain andfeasible, for every man can believe such.”

“I know not why, but all the noblest arts hold in perfection but for a very little moment. They soon reach a height from which they begin to decline, and when they have begun to decline it is a pity that they cannot be knocked on the head; for an art is like a living organism—better dead than dying.”

“All our lives long, every day and every hour, we are engaged in the process of accommodating our changed and unchanged selves to changed and unchanged surroundings: living, in fact, is nothing else than this process of accommodation; when we fail in it a little we are stupid, when flagrantly we are mad, when we give up the attempt altogether we die, when we suspend it temporarily we sleep.”

“Happiness and misery consist in a progression towards better or worse; it does not matter how high up or low down you are, it depends not on this, but on the direction in which you are tending.”

“I have never written on any subject unless I believed that the authorities on it were hopelessly wrong.”

“For society indeed of all sorts, except of course that of a few intimate friends, he had an unconquerable aversion. "I always did hate those people," he said, "and they always have hated and always will hate me. I am an Ihsmael by instinct as much as by accident of circumstances, but if I keep out of society I shall be less vulnerable than Ishmaels generally are. The moment a man goes into society, he becomes vulnerable all round.”

“It stands to reason that he who would cure a moral ailment must be practically acquainted with it in all its bearings.”

“Union may be strength, but it is mere brute strength unless wisely directed.”

“I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.”

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

“To do great work one must be very idle as well as very industrious.”

“I remember one incident which bears upon this part of the treatise. The gentleman who gave it to me had asked to see my tobacco-pipe; he examined it carefully, and when he came to the little protuberance at the bottom of the bowl he seemed much delighted, and exclaimed that it must be rudimentary. I asked him what he meant."Sir," he answered, "this organ is identical with the rim at the bottom of a cup; it is but another form of the same function. Its purposes must have been to keep the heat of the pipe from marking the table upon which it rested. You would find, if you were to look up the history of tobacco-pipes, that in early specimens this protuberance was of a different shape to what it is now. It will have been broad at the bottom, and flat, so that while the pipe was being smoked the bowl might rest upon the table without marking it. Use and disuse must have come into play and reduced the function its present rudimentary condition. I should not be surprised, sir," he continued, "if, in the course of time, it were to become modified still farther, and to assume the form of an ornamental leaf or scroll, or even a butterfly, while in some cases, it will become extinct.”

“Every one should keep a mental wastepaper basket and the older he grows the more things he will consign to it - torn up to irrecoverable tatters.”

“The flesh of animals who feed excursively is allowed to have a higher flavour than that of those who are cooped up. May there not be the same difference between men who read as their taste prompts and men who are confined in cells and colleges to stated tasks?”

“Loyalty is still the same, whether it win or lose the game; true as a dial to the sun, although it be not shined upon.”

“Having, then, once introduced an element of inconsistency into his system, he was far too consistent not to be inconsistent consistently, and he lapsed ere long into an amiable indifferentism which to outward appearance differed but little from the indifferentism …”

“People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.”

“Der Unterschied zwischen Gott und einem Historiker: Gott kann die Vergangenheit nicht ändern.”

“In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.”

“La vida es el arte de sacar conclusiones suficientes a partir de datos insuficientes.”

“we must judge men not so much by what they, as by what they make us feel that they have it in them to do. If a man has done enough in either painting, music, or the affairs of life, to make me feel that I might trust him in an emergency he has done enough”

“Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.”

“[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.”

“Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.”

“Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.”

“The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.”

“We all love best not those who offend us least, nor those who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.”

“Prayers are to men as dolls are to children.”

“Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.”

“All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income”

“I suppose in reality not a leaf goes yellow in autumn without ceasing to care about its sap and making the parent tree very uncomfortable by long growling and grumbling - but surely nature might find some less irritating way of carrying on business if she would give her mind to it. Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow, but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before it began to live consciously on its own account?”

“Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances. Even if they are unhappy - very unhappy - it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from finding it out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness.To parents who wish to lead a quiet life I would say: Tell your children that they are naughty - much naughtier than most children. Point to the young people of some acquaintances as models of perfection and impress your own children with a deep sense of their own inferiority. You carry so many more guns than they do that they cannot fight you. This is called moral influence, and it will enable you to bounce them as much as you please. They think you know and they will not have yet caught you lying often enough to suspect that you are not the unworldly and scrupulously truthful person which you represent yourself to be; nor yet will they know how great a coward you are, nor how soon you will run away if they fight you with persistency and judgment. You keep the dice and throw them both for your children and yourself. Load them then, for you can easily manage to stop your children from examining them. Tell them how singularly indulgent you are; insist on the incalculable benefit you conferred upon them, firstly in bringing them into the world at all, but more particularly in bringing them into it as your own children rather than anyone else's... You hold all the trump cards, or if you do not you can filch them; if you play them with anything like judgment you will find yourselves heads of happy, united, God-fearing families... True, your children will probably find out all about it some day, but not until too late to be of much service to them or inconvenience to yourself.”

“Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime”

“We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to them.”

“Life is one long process of getting tired.”

“When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence. ”

“You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.”

“To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know he is dead.”

“Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.”

“Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.”

“We can never get rid of mouse-ideas completely, they keep turning up again and again, and nibble, nibble--no matter how often we drive them off. The best way to keep them down is to have a few good strong cat-ideas which will embrace them and ensure their not reappearing till they do so in another shape.”

“Nao só nada é bom ou mau, mas é o pensamento que o faz assim, como também nada é absolutamente, excepto na medida em que o pensamento o faz assim.”

“The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.”

“Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.”

“All animals except man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.”

“To live is like to love--all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it”

“Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule.”

“A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.”

“Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds”

“a man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.”