Zitat des Tages von Samuel Butler:
My main wish is to get my books into other people's rooms, and to keep other people's books out of mine.
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.
The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.
No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.
In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa.
The seven deadly sins: Want of money, bad health, bad temper, chastity, family ties, knowing that you know things, and believing in the Christian religion.
A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner, but more durable alloy.
Money is the last enemy that shall never be subdued. While there is flesh there is money or the want of money, but money is always on the brain so long as there is a brain in reasonable order.
The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.
When you have told anyone you have left him a legacy, the only decent thing to do is die at once.
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.
I really do not see much use in exalting the humble and meek; they do not remain humble and meek long when they are exalted.
Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.
Our ideas are for the most part like bad sixpences, and we spend our lives trying to pass them on one another.
To live is like to love - all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.
Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?
There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.
From a worldly point of view, there is no mistake so great as that of being always right.
Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch a cold on overexposure.
Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.
It is tact that is golden, not silence.
People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable.
If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.
To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all.
The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.
If the headache would only precede the intoxication, alcoholism would be a virtue.
If God wants us to do a thing, he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him.
There is no such source of error as the pursuit of truth.
The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.
Men should not try to overstrain their goodness more than any other faculty, bodily or mental.
It is the function of vice to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.
A physician's physiology has much the same relation to his power of healing as a cleric's divinity has to his power of influencing conduct.
Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.
Life is one long process of getting tired.
An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.
The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.