The Note-Books of Samuel Butler

i

I imagine that life can give nothing much better or much worse than what I have myself experienced.  I should say I had proved pretty well the extremes of mental pleasure and pain; and so I believe each in his own way does, almost every man.

ii

I have squandered my life as a schoolboy squanders a tip.  But then half, or more than half the fun a schoolboy gets out of a tip consists in the mere fact of having something to squander.  Squandering is in itself delightful, and so I found it with my life in my younger days.  I do not squander it now, but I am not sorry that I have squandered a good deal of it.  What a heap of rubbish there would have been if I had not!  Had I not better set about squandering what is left of it?