Samuel Butler

I went to the Bach Choir concert and heard Mozart’s Requiem. I did not rise warmly to it. Then I heard an extract from Parsifal which I disliked very much. If Bach wriggles, Wagner writhes…

Don’t learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world.

Opinions have vested interests just as men have.

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

To live is like to love – all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.

The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.

On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world.

Excellence must be pursued, it must be wooed with all of one’s might and every bit of effort that we have each day there’s a new encounter, each week is a new challenge.

The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

Avoid popularity it has many snares and no real benefit.

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

Love can often be misguided and do as much harm as good, but respect can do only good. It assumes that the other person’s stature is as large as one’s own, his rights as reasonable, his needs as important.

It is tact that is golden, not silence.

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library.

We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.

There must be what Mr. Gladstone many years ago called a blessed act of oblivion. We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.