Samuel Butler

Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.

Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.

The clergyman is expected to be a kind of human Sunday. Things must not be done in him which are venial in the week-day classes. He is paid for this business of leading a stricter life than other people. It is his raison d’être. If his parishioners feel that he does this, they approve of him, for they look upon him as their own contribution towards what they deem a holy life. This is why the clergyman is so often called a vicar — he being the person whose vicarious goodness is to stand for that of those entrusted to his charge. But his home is his castle as much as that of any other Englishman, and with him, as with others, unnatural tension in public is followed by exhaustion when tension is no longer necessary. His children are the most defenceless things he can reach, and it is on them in nine cases out of ten that he will relieve his mind. A

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.

The room in fact was as depressing from its slatternliness as from its atmosphere of erudition.

A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog; but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide.

Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.

Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it.

Exploring is delightful to look forward to and back upon, but it is not comfortable at the time, unless it be of such an easy nature as not to deserve the name.

We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to them.

A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.

We are not won by arguments that we can analyze but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself.

I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.

It stands to reason that he who would cure a moral ailment must be practically acquainted with it in all its bearings.

He that complies against his will
Is of his own opinion still.