Samuel Butler

Christ was only crucified once and for a few hours. Think of the hundreds of thousands whom Christ has been crucifying in a quiet way ever since.

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

He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still.

The thief. Once committed beyond a certain point he should not worry himself too much about not being a thief any more. Thieving is God’s message to him. Let him try and be a good thief.

To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all.

Man is God’s highest present development. He is the latest thing in God.

Just do what works for you, because there will always be someone who think diffenrently…

Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.

Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions, but those who kindly reprove thy faults.

It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

It were endless to dispute upon everything that is disputable.

Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has repressed. It only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.

Without friends the world is but a wilderness. There is no man that imparteth his joys to his friends, but he joyeth the more; and no man that imparteth his grieves to his friend, but he grieveth the less.

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change thing I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

They that have grown old in a single state are generally found to be morose, fretful and captious; tenacious of their own practices and maxims; soon offended by contradiction or negligence; and impatient of any association but with those that will watch their nod, and submit themselves to unlimited authority.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit – not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviate from their graves.