Samuel Butler: Trending quotes (page 3)

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“Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.”

Samuel Butler

Silence and Tact
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy

Silence

“All men can do great things, if they know what great things are.”

Samuel Butler

Great Things
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XI - Cash and Credit

Men

“You can have all ego, or all non-ego, but in theory you cannot have half one and half the other — yet in practice this is exactly what you must have, for everything is both itself and not itself at one and the same time.”

Samuel Butler

Ego and Non-Ego
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XX - First Principles

Time

“Every one should keep a mental waste-paper basket and the older he grows the more things he will consign to it — torn up to irrecoverable tatters.”

Samuel Butler

Waste-Paper Baskets
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy

“An artist’s touches are sometimes no more articulate than the barking of a dog who would call attention to something without exactly knowing what. This is as it should be, and he is a great artist who can be depended on not to bark at nothing.”

Samuel Butler

Inarticulate Touches
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part IX - A Painter's Views on Painting

Dogs , Dependency

“Feeling is an art and, like any other art, can be acquired by taking pains.”

Samuel Butler

Feeling
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VI - Mind and Matter

Pain , Art , Feeling

“Handel and Shakespeare have left us the best that any have left us; yet, in spite of this, how much of their lives was wasted.”

Samuel Butler

Waste
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VIII - Handel and Music

“But so engrained in the human heart is the desire to believe that some people really do know what they say they know, and can thus save them from the trouble of thinking for themselves, that in a short time would-be philosophers and faddists became more powerful than ever, and gradually led their countrymen to accept all those absurd views of life.”

Samuel Butler

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 27

Life , People , Thinking , Time

“A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.”

Samuel Butler

Life and Habit http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/lfhb10h.htm, ch. 8 (1877)

Way

“There are two classes of people in this world, those who sin, and those who are sinned against; if a man must belong to either, he had better belong to the first than to the second.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 26

People , World

“An energy is a soul — a something working in us.”

Samuel Butler

Matter and Mind, iii
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VI - Mind and Matter

Soul

“Morality is the custom of one’s country and the current feeling of one’s peers. Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country.”

Samuel Butler

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

Feeling , Country

“If you tie Handel’s hands by debarring him from the rendering of human emotion, and if you set Bach’s free by giving him no human emotion to render — if, in fact, you rob Handel of his opportunities and Bach of his difficulties — the two men can fight after a fashion, but Handel will even so come off victorious.”

Samuel Butler

Handel and Bach, i
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VIII - Handel and Music

Men , Fashion , Victory , Fight

“A man’s friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage—but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 75

Friendship , Marriage

“Intellectual over-indulgence is the most gratuitous and disgraceful form which excess can take, nor is there any the consequences of which are more disastrous.”

Samuel Butler

Intellectual Self-Indulgence
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part II - Elementary Morality

“It is with philosophy as with just intonation on a piano, if you get everything quite straight and on all fours in one department, in perfect tune, it is delightful so long as you keep well in the middle of the key; but as soon as you modulate you find the new key is out of tune and the more remotely you modulate the more out of tune you get.”

Samuel Butler

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

Perfection

“The supposition that the world is ever in league to put a man down is childish. Hardly less childish is it for an author to lay the blame on reviewers. A good sturdy author is a match for a hundred reviewers.”

Samuel Butler

Ephemeral and Permanent Success
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XI - Cash and Credit

World