It is bad enough to see one’s own good things fathered on other people, but it is worse to have other people’s rubbish fathered upon oneself. – Samuel Butler
They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, Can he name a kitten? – Samuel Butler
If there is any moral in Christianity, if there is anything to be learned from it, if the whole story is not profitless from first to last, it comes to this: that a man should back his own opinion against the world s. – Samuel Butler
There are single thoughts that contain the essence of a whole volume, single sentences that have the beauties of a large work, a simplicity so finished and so perfect that it equals in merit and in excellence a large and glorious composition. – Joseph Joubert (1754–1824), translated from French by George H. Calvert, 1