Samuel Butler

The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.

Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.

The world will only, in the end, follow those who have despised as well as served it.

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

Birth and death are so closely related that one could not destroy either without destroying the other at the same time. It is extinction that makes creation possible.

To be a man’s own fool is bad enough, but the vain man is everybody’s.

If a man knew anything, he would sit in a corner and be modest; but he is such an ignorant peacock, that he goes bustling up and down, and hits on extraordinary discoveries.

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.

If you and I are having a single thought of violence or hatred against anyone in the world at this moment, we are contributing to the wounding of the world.

Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance.

I am not an optimist, but a great believer of hope.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

Haste makes Work which Caution prevents.

We know there is intention and purpose in the universe, because there is intention and purpose in us.

We have a lot of anxieties, and one cancels out another very often.

I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west. We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.

The liar’s punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

The wilderness is near as well as dear to every man. Even the oldest villages are indebted to the border of wild wood which surrounds them, more than to the gardens of men. There is something indescribably inspiriting and beautiful in the aspect of the forest skirting and occasionally jutting into the midst of new towns, which, like the sand-heaps of fresh fox-burrows, have sprung up in their midst. The very uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor of nature. Our lives need the relief of such a background, where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Subdue your passion or it will subdue you.