Samuel Butler

A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage—but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.

Taking numbers into account, I should think more mental suffering had been undergone in the streets leading from St George's, Hanover Square, than in the condemned cells of Newgate.

Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself, and the more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly will his character appear in spite of him.

To me it seems that those who are happy in this world are better and more lovable people than those who are not.

A man can stand being told that he must submit to a severe surgical operation, or that he has some disease which will shortly kill him, or that he will be a cripple or blind for the rest of his life; dreadful as such tidings must be, we do not find that they unnerve the greatest number of mankind; most men, indeed, go coolly enough even to be hanged, but the strongest quail before financial ruin, and the better men they are, the more complete, as a general rule, is their prostration.

Adversity, if a man is set down to it by degrees, is more supportable with equanimity by most people than any great prosperity arrived at in a single lifetime.

An empty house is like a stray dog or a body from which life has departed.

How is it, I wonder, that all religious officials, from God the Father to the parish beadle, should be so arbitrary and exacting.

We know so well what we are doing ourselves and why we do it, do we not? I fancy that there is some truth in the view which is being put forward nowadays, that it is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us.

There are two classes of people in this world, those who sin, and those who are sinned against; if a man must belong to either, he had better belong to the first than to the second.

It is far safer to know too little than too much. People will condemn the one, though they will resent being called upon to exert themselves to follow the other.

All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.