Samuel Butler

Exploring is delightful to look forward to and back upon, but it is not comfortable at the time, unless it be of such an easy nature as not to deserve the name.

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

Peter remained on friendly terms with Christ notwithstanding Christ's having healed his mother-in-law.

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

Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule. Nevertheless one had better know the rules, for they sometimes guide in doubtful cases, though not often.

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.

Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.

Words are clothes that thoughts wear

We want words to do more than they can. We try to do with them what comes to very much like trying to mend a watch with a pickaxe or to paint a miniature with a mop; we expect them to help us to grip and dissect that which in ultimate essence is as ungrippable as shadow. Nevertheless there they are; we have got to live with them, and the wise course is to treat them as we do our neighbours, and make the best and not the worst of them.

Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

If people who are in a difficulty will only do the first little reasonable thing which they can clearly recognize as reasonable, they will always find the next step more easy both to see and take.

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

If, again, the most superficial introspection teaches the physiologist that his conscious life is dependent upon the mechanical adjustments of his body, and that inversely his body is subjected with certain limitations to his will, then it only remains for him to make one assumption more, namely, that this mutual interdependence between the spiritual and the material is itself also dependent on law, and he has discovered the bond by which the science of the matter and the science of consciousness are united into a single whole.

Prayers are to men as dolls are to children.

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

There are orphanages," he exclaimed to himself, "for children who have lost their parents--oh! why, why, why, are there no harbours of refuge for grown men who have not yet lost them?

Truth might be heroic, but it was not within the range of practical domestic politics.

In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.