Samuel Butler

Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch a cold on overexposure.

God cannot alter the past, but historians can.

Those who have never had a father can at any rate never know the sweets of losing one. To most men the death of his father is a new lease of life.

A lawyers dream of heaven; every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.

The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

When you’ve told someone that you’ve left them a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.

Anger is short madness

What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

You cannot spend money in luxury without doing good to the poor. Nay, you do more good to them by spending it in luxury, than by giving it; for by spending it in luxury, you make them exert industry, whereas by giving it, you keep them idle.

Courage is exhilarating.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

A am a great friend of public amusements, they keep people from vice.

I am stronger than my fear.

There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.

Only poetry inspires poetry.

Knowledge does not come to us in details, but in flashes of light from heaven.

True irreverence is disrespect for another man’s god.

The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.

He who praises every body, praises nobody.