Samuel Butler

Every new idea has something of the pain and peril of childbirth about it; ideas are just as mortal and just as immortal as organised beings are.

In art, never try to find out anything, or try to learn anything until the not knowing it has come to be a nuisance to you for some time. Then you will remember it, but not otherwise. Let knowledge importune you before you will hear it. …

There is nothing less powerful than knowledge unattached, and incapable of application. That is why what little knowledge I have has done myself personally so much harm. I do not know much, but if I knew a good deal less than that little I …

My notes always grow longer if I shorten them. I mean the process of compression makes them more pregnant and they breed new notes.

Always eat grapes downwards — that is, always eat the best grape first; in this way there will be none better left on the bunch, and each grape will seem good down to the last.

All things are like exposed photographic plates that have no visible image on them till they have been developed.

[Ideas] are like shadows — substantial enough until we try to grasp them.

The written law is binding, but the unwritten law is much more so. You may break the written law at a pinch and on the sly if you can, but the unwritten law — which often comprises the written — must not be broken. Not being written, it is …

Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.

Words impede and either kill, or are killed by, perfect thought; but they are, as a scaffolding, useful, if not indispensable, for the building up of imperfect thought and helping to perfect it.

The mere fact that a thought or idea can be expressed articulately in words involves that it is still open to question; and the mere fact that a difficulty can be definitely conceived involves that it is open to solution.

Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.

Thought pure and simple is as near to God as we can get; it is through this that we are linked with God.

All eating is a kind of proselytising — a kind of dogmatising — a maintaining that the eater's way of looking at things is better than the eatee's.

When we go up to the shelves in the reading-room of the British Museum, how like it is to wasps flying up and down an apricot tree that is trained against a wall, or cattle coming down to drink at a pool!

Moral influence means persuading another that one can make that other more uncomfortable than that other can make oneself.

Feeling is an art and, like any other art, can be acquired by taking pains.

Animals and plants cannot understand our business, so we have denied that they can understand their own. What we call inorganic matter cannot understand the animals' and plants' business, we have therefore denied that it can understand …

An energy is a soul — a something working in us.

In the highest consciousness there is still unconsciousness, in the lowest unconsciousness there is still consciousness. If there is no consciousness there is no thing, or nothing. To understand perfectly would be to cease to understand at …

All thinking is of disturbance, dynamical, a state of unrest tending towards equilibrium. It is all a mode of classifying and of criticising with a view of knowing whether it gives us, or is likely to give us, pleasure or no.

We are so far identical with our ancestors and our contemporaries that it is very rarely we can see anything that they do not see. It is not unjust that the sins of the fathers should be visited upon the children, for the children …

Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another. To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to forget and to forget is to die.

To be is to think and to be thinkable. To live is to continue thinking and to remember having done so.