Samuel Butler: Trending quotes

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Samuel Butler: 464 quotes13 likes

“People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.”

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

“An empty house is like a stray dog or a body from which life has departed.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 72

“The mere fact that a thought or idea can be expressed articulately in words involves that it is still open to question; and the mere fact that a difficulty can be definitely conceived involves that it is open to solution.”

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

“I am not sure that I do not begin to like the correction of a mistake, even when it involves my having shown much ignorance and stupidity, as well as I like hitting on a new idea.”

Inaccuracy
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XXII - Reconciliation

“Morality turns on whether the pleasure precedes or follows the pain. Thus, it is immoral to get drunk because the headache comes after the drinking, but if the headache came first, and the drunkenness afterwards, it would be moral to get drunk.”

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

“For property is robbery, but then, we are all robbers or would-be robbers together, and have found it essential to organise our thieving, as we have found it necessary to organise our lust and our revenge. Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.”

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 12

“I do not like books. I believe I have the smallest library of any literary man in London, and I have no wish to increase it. I keep my books at the British Museum and at Mudie's, and it makes me very angry if anyone gives me one for my private library.”

Ramblings In Cheapside (1890)

“Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.”

As quoted in 1,911 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (1988) by Robert Byrne

“I should not advise anyone with ordinary independence of mind to attempt the public ear unless he is confident that he can out-lung and out-last his own generation; for if he has any force, people will and ought to be on their guard against him, inasmuch as there is no knowing where he may not take them.”

Ramblings In Cheapside (1890)

“It is here that almost all religions go wrong. Their priests try to make us believe that they know more about the unseen world than those whose eyes are still blinded by the seen, can ever know--forgetting that while to deny the existence of an unseen kingdom is bad, to pretend that we know more about it than its bare existence is no better.”

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 15

“Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures, for so were the counsels of Jove fulfilled from the day on which the son of Atreus, king of men, and great Achilles, first fell out with one another.”

First lines of Butler's translation of The Iliad (1898)

“When we go up to the shelves in the reading-room of the British Museum, how like it is to wasps flying up and down an apricot tree that is trained against a wall, or cattle coming down to drink at a pool!”

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

“Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another. To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to forget and to forget is to die.”

Antithesis
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part IV - Memory and Design

“One can bring no greater reproach against a man than to say that he does not set sufficient value upon pleasure, and there is no greater sign of a fool than the thinking that he can tell at once and easily what it is that pleases him. To know this is not easy, and how to extend our knowledge of it is the highest and the most neglected of all arts and branches of education.”

On Knowing what Gives us Pleasure, i
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIII - Unprofessional Sermons

“No one thinks he will escape death, so there is no disappointment and, as long as we know neither the when nor the how, the mere fact that we shall one day have to go does not much affect us; we do not care, even though we know vaguely that we have not long to live. The serious trouble begins when death becomes definite in time and shape. It is in precise fore-knowledge, rather than in sin, that the sting of death is to be found; and such fore-knowledge is generally withheld; though, strangely enough, many would have it if they could.”

Fore-knowledge of Death
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XXIII - Death

“People say that there are neither dragons to be killed nor distressed maidens to be rescued nowadays. I do not know, but I think I have dropped across one or two, nor do I feel sure whether the most mortal wounds have been inflicted by the dragons or by myself.”

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

“We are not won by arguments that we can analyse, but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself.”

Argument http://books.google.com/books?id=JHguFYrTEQ0C&q=&quot;We+are+not+won+by+arguments+that+we+can+analyse+but+by+tone+and+temper+by+the+manner+which+is+the+man+himself&quot;&pg=PA329#v=onepage <br class="br">The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XX - First Principles

“Strange fate for man! He must perish if he get that, which he must perish if he strive not after. If he strive not after it he is no better than the brutes, if he get it he is more miserable than the devils.”

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 19

“I call it to mind and delight in it now, but I did not notice it at the time. We next to never know when we are well off: but this cuts two ways,--for if we did, we should perhaps know better when we are ill off also; and I have sometimes thought that there are as many ignorant of the one as of the other. He who wrote, “O fortunatos nimium sua si bona norint agricolas,” might have written quite as truly, “O infortunatos nimium sua si mala norint”; and there are few of us who are not protected from the keenest pain by our inability to see what it is that we have done, what we are suffering, and what we truly are. Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.”

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 3

“Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who traveled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home.”

The Odyssey of Homer (1900), opening lines