Samuel Butler

Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.

A man’s friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage – but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.

Heaven is the work of the best and kindest men and women. Hell is the work of prigs, pedants and professional truth-tellers. The world is an attempt to make the best of Heaven and Hell.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

When the water of a place is bad it is safest to drink none that has not been filtered through either the berry of a grape, or else a tub of malt. These are the most reliable filters yet invented.

We all like to forgive, and love best not those who offend us least, nor who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.

Best friend, my well-spring in the wilderness!

All of humanity is living in a dream world, but suffering real consequences.

O Lord, help me not to despise or oppose what I do not understand.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints.

We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.

Strange – is it not? That of the myriads who Before us passed the door of Darkness through, Not one returns to tell us of the road Which to discover we must travel too.

The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right.

Patience – the gift of being able to see past the emotion.

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

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

When you have told anyone you have left him a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.

This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, slow rises worth by poverty depressed.

One little bird not larger than a sparrow, it may have been a Phalarope, would alight on the turbulent surface where the breakers were five or six feet high, and float buoyantly there like a duck, cunningly taking to its wings and lifting itself a few feet through the air over the foaming crest of each breaker, but sometimes outriding safely a considerable billow which hid it some seconds, when its instinct told it that it would not break. It was a little creature thus to sport with the ocean, but it was as perfect a success in its way as the breakers in theirs.

A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.