“How loosely our thoughts must hang together when the whiff of a smell, a band playing in the street, a face seen in the fire, or on the gnarled stem of a tree, will lead them into such vagaries at a moment’s warning.”
“Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.”
“A sense of humour keen enough to show a man his own absurdities, as well as those of other people, will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those that are worth committing.”
“There are two great rules of life, the one general and the other particular. The first is that every one can, in the end, get what he wants if he only tries. This is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is, more or less, an exception to the general rule.”
“Nature is essentially mean, mediocre. You can have schemes for raising the level of this mean, but not for making every one two inches taller than his neighbour, and this is what people really care about.”
“The world will always be governed by self-interest. We should not try to stop this, we should try to make the self-interest of cads a little more coincident with that of decent people.”
“Lucky and Unlucky. People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.”
“A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.”
“Oxford and Cambridge. The dons are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.”
“Professional truth-tellers may be trusted to profess that they are telling the truth.”
“A little boy and a little girl were looking at a picture of Adam and Eve. ‘Which is Adam and which is Eve?’ said one. ‘I do not know,’ said the other, ‘but I could tell if they had their clothes on.’”
“The firmest line that can be drawn upon the smoothest paper has still jagged edges if seen through a microscope. This does not matter until important deductions are made on the supposition that there are no jagged edges.” (The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, 1912).