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.

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.

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…

What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, I bet that my Redeemer liveth.

No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.

The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.

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

Everything that is made beautiful and fair and lovely is made for the eye of one who sees.

Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

Be yourself. Follow your instincts. Success depends, at least in part, on the ability to carry it off.

Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.

To get a name can happen but to few; it is one of the few things that cannot be brought. It is the free gift of mankind, which must be deserved before it will be granted, and is at last unwillingly bestowed.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.

Piety practiced in solitude, like the flower that blooms in the desert, may give its fragrance to the winds of heaven, and delight those unbodied spirits that survey the works of God and the actions of men; but it bestows no assistance upon earthly beings, and however free from taints of impurity, yet wants the sacred splendor of beneficence.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

Always two there are, no more, no less. A master and an apprentice.

The truest end of life is to know that life never ends.