Samuel Butler

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

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.

The seven deadly sins: Want of money, bad health, bad temper, chastity, family ties, knowing that you know things, and believing in the Christian religion.

To himself everyone is an immortal. He may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

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

Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.

Women are like tea bags. You never know how strong they are until they are in hot water.

Resting at your shore fills me with a peace, as if I’ve always been here. My cells resonating with the element of you, boundaries diffuse as one.

You must not only aim right, but draw the bow with all your might.

Self-denial is not a virtue, it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

We do not count a man’s years until he has nothing else to count.

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.

No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.

Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.

If a man’s fortune does not fit him, it is like the shoe in the story; if too large it trips him up, if too small it pinches him.

If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.

Disappointment, when it involves neither shame nor loss, is as good as success; for it supplies as many images to the mind, and as many topics to the tongue.