Life is the distribution of an error—or errors.
Murray (the publisher) said that my _Life of Dr. Butler_ was an omnium gatherum. Yes, but life is an omnium gatherum.
Life is a superstition. But superstitions are not without their value. The snail’s shell is a superstition, slugs have no shells and thrive just as well. But a snail without a shell would not be a slug unless it had also the slug’s indifference to a shell.
Life is one long process of getting tired.
My days run through me as water through a sieve.
Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.
Life is eight parts cards and two parts play, the unseen world is made manifest to us in the play.
Lizards generally seem to have lost their tails by the time they reach middle life. So have most men.
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.
Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule. Nevertheless one had better know the rules, for they sometimes guide in doubtful cases—though not often.
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.
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
The world is a gambling-table so arranged that all who enter the casino must play and all must lose more or less heavily in the long run, though they win occasionally by the way.
We play out our days as we play out cards, taking them as they come, not knowing what they will be, hoping for a lucky card and sometimes getting one, often getting just the wrong one.
The world may not be particularly wise—still, we know of nothing wiser.
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.