Samuel Butler: Trending quotes

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Samuel Butler: 464 quotes13 likes

“Their view evidently was that genius was like offences--needs must that it come, but woe unto that man through whom it comes. A man’s business, they hold, is to think as his neighbours do, for Heaven help him if he thinks good what they count bad. And really it is hard to see how the Erewhonian theory differs from our own, for the word “idiot” only means a person who forms his opinions for himself.”

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 22

“A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.”

Definitions, iii
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy

“The advantage of doing one’s praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 34

“Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself, and the more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly will his character appear in spite of him.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 14

“As a general rule philosophy is like stirring mud or not letting a sleeping dog lie. It is an attempt to deny, circumvent or otherwise escape from the consequences of the interlacing of the roots of things with one another.”

Philosophy
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XX - First Principles

“Everything matters more than we think it does, and, at the same time, nothing matters so much as we think it does. The merest spark may set all Europe in a blaze, but though all Europe be set in a blaze twenty times over, the world will wag itself right again.”

Sparks
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy

“An idea must not be condemned for being a little shy and incoherent; all new ideas are shy when introduced first among our old ones. We should have patience and see whether the incoherency is likely to wear off or to wear on, in which latter case the sooner we get rid of them the better.”

Incoherency of New Ideas
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy

“Ideas and opinions, like living organisms, have a normal rate of growth which cannot be either checked or forced beyond a certain point. They can be held in check more safely than they can be hurried. They can also be killed; and one of the surest ways to kill them is to try to hurry them.”

The Art of Propagating Opinion
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part X - The Position of a HomoUnius Libri

“Critics generally come to be critics by reason not of their fitness for this but of their unfitness for anything else. Books should be tried by a judge and jury as though they were crimes, and counsel should be heard on both sides.”

Criticism
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VII - On the Making of Music, Pictures, and Books

“Is there any religion whose followers can be pointed to as distinctly more amiable and trustworthy than those of any other? If so, this should be enough. I find the nicest and best people generally profess no religion at all, but are ready to like the best men of all religions.”

Religion
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part II - Elementary Morality

“If a person would understand either the Odyssey or any other ancient work, he must never look at the dead without seeing the living in them, nor at the living without thinking of the dead. We are too fond of seeing the ancients as one thing and the moderns as another.”

Ancient Work
Source: The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XII - The Enfant Terrible of Literature

“Animals and plants cannot understand our business, so we have denied that they can understand their own. What we call inorganic matter cannot understand the animals' and plants' business, we have therefore denied that it can understand anything whatever.”

Organic and Inorganic
Source: The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VI - Mind and Matter