Samuel Butler said this quote

Prayers are to men as dolls are to children.

~ Samuel Butler

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 is a shock; every shock is a pro tanto death. What we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to recognize a past and a present as resembling one another.

~ Samuel Butler

[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.

~ Samuel Butler

Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.

~ Samuel Butler