God became a man, granted. The devil became a woman.
Victor Hugo
1835 - 1902. British writer and satirist, author of "Erewhon" and "The Way of All Flesh".
1. "Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use."
Categories: Oration and Silence
2. "Truth consists not in never lying but in knowing when to lie and when not to do so."
Categories: Truth and Falsity
3. "To live is like to love - all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it."
source: "Notebooks"
Categories: Life and Death -:- Love
4. "To die completely, a person must not only forget but be forgotten, and he who is not forgotten is not dead."
Categories: Life and Death -:- Memory
5. "The most perfect humour and irony is generally quite unconscious."
source: "Life and Habit"
Categories: Wit and Humor
6. "The greatest pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself."
Categories: Nature and Animals
7. "The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way."
source: "The Way of All Flesh"
Categories: Truth and Falsity
8. "Sin is like a mountain with two aspects according to whether it is viewed before or after it has been reached: yet both aspects are real."
Categories: Sin and Conscience
9. "Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers. Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country."
Categories: Various
10. "Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another. To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to forget and to forget is to die."
Categories: Memory
11. "Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises."
source: "The Note-Books of Samuel Butler"
Categories: Life and Death
12. "Life is one long process of getting tired."
source: "Notebooks"
Categories: Life and Death
13. "Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on."
Categories: Life and Death
14. "Heaven is the work of the best and kindest men and women. Hell is the work of prigs, pedants and professional truth-tellers. The world is an attempt to make the best of both."
source: "The Note-Books of Samuel Butler"
Categories: Good and Evil
15. "Genius [...] has been defined as a supreme capacity for taking trouble. [...] It might be more fitly described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds and keeping them therein so long as the genius remains."
source: "Notebooks"
Categories: Talent and Genius
16. "Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them."
source: "Notebooks"
Categories: Art and Culture -:- Education
17. "Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well."
Categories: Truth and Falsity
18. "All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it."
source: "The Way of All Flesh"
Categories: Life and Death -:- Nature and Animals
19. "A lawyer's dream of heaven: every man reclaimed his own property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers."
Categories: Law and Crime
20. "A great portrait is always more a portrait of the painter than of the painted. "
Categories: Art and Culture
21. "A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words."
Categories: Various
2007, collected and compiled by Kazimierz Matan
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