Samuel Butler

Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.

The world will only, in the end, follow those who have despised as well as served it.

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

Arguments are like fire-arms which a man may keep at home but should not carry about with him.

Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.

Everyone should keep a mental wastepaper basket, and the older he grows, the more things will he promptly consign to it.

Anger makes dull men witty – but it keeps them poor.

This is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put.

The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.

Forget and forgive. This is not difficult when properly understood. It means forget inconvenient duties, then forgive yourself for forgetting. By rigid practice and stern determination, it comes easy.

Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.

Failure at some point in your life is inevitable, but giving up is unforgivable.

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.

Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.

Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation.

If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.

Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.

None of the affections have been noted to fascinate and bewitch but envy.

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.