We want words to do more than they can. We try to do with them what comes to very much like trying to mend a watch with a pickaxe or to paint a miniature with a mop; we expect them to help us to grip and dissect that which in ultimate essence is as ungrippable as shadow. Nevertheless there they are; we have got to live with them, and the wise course is to treat them as we do our neighbours, and make the best and not the worst of them. Samuel Butler
Some Similar Quotes
  1. It happens like this. "One day you meet someone and for some inexplicable reason, you feel more connected to this stranger than anyone else--closer to them than your closest family. Perhaps this person carries within them an angel--one sent to you for some higher purpose;... - Lang Leav
  2. A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous. - Ingrid Bergman
  3. Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover,... - William Shakespeare
  4. Two words. Three vowels. Four constenants. Seven letters. It can either cut you open to the core and leave you in ungodly pain or it can free your soul and lift a tremendous weight off you shoulders. The phrase is: It's over. - Maggi Richard
  5. Remember how it was when we kissed? Armfuls and armfuls of light thrown right at us. A rope dropping down from the sky. How can the word love and the word life even fit in the mouth? - Jandy Nelson
More Quotes By Samuel Butler
  1. Prayers are to men as dolls are to children.
  2. All animals except man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.
  3. Embryos think with each stage of their development that they have now reached the only condition that really suits them. This, they say, must certainly be their last, inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock that nothing can survive it. Every change...
  4. [P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.
  5. Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.
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