Samuel Butler

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

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.

We all like to forgive, and love best not those who offend us least, nor who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.

Priests are not men of the world it is not intended that they should be and a University training is the one best adapted to prevent their becoming so.

Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbours, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them.

The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.

To give pain is the tyranny to make happy, the true empire of beauty.

The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it.

The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

Life is not an exact science, it is an art.

The history of art is the history of revivals.

Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.