Samuel Butler

Every one is a genius, more or less. No one is so physically sound that no part of him will be even a little unsound, and no one is so diseased but that some part of him will be healthy — so no man is so mentally and morally sound, but that he will be in part both mad and wicked; and no man is so mad and wicked but he will be sensible and honourable in part. In like manner there is no genius who is not also a fool, and no fool who is not also a genius.

You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.

There is no such source of error as the pursuit of truth.

He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most. God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us.

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.

For most men, and most circumstances, pleasure –tangible material prosperity in this world -is the safest test of virtue. Progress has ever been through the pleasures rather than through the extreme sharp virtues, and the most virtuous have leaned to excess rather than to asceticism.

I would advise you Sir, to study algebra, if you are not already an adept in it: your head would be less muddy, and you will leave off tormenting your neighbors about paper and packthread, while we all live together in a world that is bursting with sin and sorrow.

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.

What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?

What drives me to be who I am, to do all that I do, is not what words will be engraved for my epitaph. What drives me to be who I am, to do what I do, is not vanity, is not for adulation in the eyes of others. What drives me is my own desire to be better; to be happy. When I am dead and buried, the words above will not bring me back to life, I choose to live out my epitaph, and not just for it to be a collection of words someone has chosen to define me.

Goodness is the only investment which never fails.

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too.

Most people think that aging is irreversible and we know that there are mechanisms even in the human machinery that allow for the reversal of aging, through correction of diet, through anti-oxidants, through removal of toxins from the body, through exercise, through yoga and breathing techniques, and through meditation.

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

All that I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful.

The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.

The human race was always interesting and we know by its past that it will always continue so, monotonously.

The public do not know enough to be experts, but know enough to decide between them.