Samuel Butler

The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.

Words, words, words," he writes, "are the stumbling-blocks in the way of truth. Until you think of things as they are, and not of the words that misrepresent them, you cannot think rightly. Words produce the appearance of hard and fast lines where there are none. 

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.

We can see nothing face to face; our utmost seeing is but a fumbling of blind finger-ends in an overcrowded pocket.

The limits of the body seem well defined enough as definitions go, but definitions seldom go far.

Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life.