Samuel Butler

The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it.

Neither have they hearts to stay, nor wit enough to run away.

Logic is like the sword

The dead should be judged like criminals, impartially, but they should be allowed the benefit of the doubt.

There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire absence of thought.

A physician’s physiology has much the same relation to his power of healing as a cleric’s divinity has to his power of influencing conduct.

God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.

Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.

It is not where you start but how high you aim that matters for success.

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn’t got any.

It is wonderful to think how men of very large estates not only spend their yearly income, but are often actually in want of money. It is clear, they have not value for what they spend.

Life is one long process of getting tired.

You cannot kill time without injuring eternity.

Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.

It is very easy in the world to live by the opinion of the world. It is very easy in solitude to be self-centered. But the finished man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.

All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.

What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man’s breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea, to discover a great thought – an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plough had gone over before. To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find a way to make the lightning carry your messages. To be the first – that is the idea.