Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost. – Samuel Butler
People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced. – Samuel Butler
A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those worth committing. – Samuel Butler
Every mans work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself. – Samuel Butler
But on the first day came veiled spirits from all hours into his soul… a soft intoxication, which the atmosphere of nature, like that of a wine-store, communicated to him, spread itself, like an enchanted solitude around his soul. – Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Hesperus, or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography,