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“There are some things which it is madness not to try to know but which it is almost as much madness to try to know.”

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

“Most artists, whether in religion, music, literature, painting, or what not, are shopkeepers in disguise. They hide their shop as much as they can, and keep pretending that it does not exist, but they are essentially shopkeepers and nothing else.”

Samuel Butler

The Artist and the Shopkeeper
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XI - Cash and Credit

“The composer is seldom a great theorist; the theorist is never a great composer. Each is equally fatal to and essential in the other.”

Samuel Butler

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

“The true laws of God are the laws of our own well-being.”

Samuel Butler

God's Laws
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part II - Elementary Morality

““To be born,” they say, “is a felony--it is a capital crime, for which sentence may be executed at any moment after the commission of the offence. You may perhaps happen to live for some seventy or eighty years, but what is that, compared with the eternity you now enjoy? And even though the sentence were commuted, and you were allowed to live on for ever, you would in time become so terribly weary of life that execution would be the greatest mercy to you.”

Samuel Butler

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 19

“Stowed away in a Montreal lumber room
The Discobolus standeth and turneth his face to the wall;
Dusty, cobweb-covered, maimed and set at naught,
Beauty crieth in an attic and no man regardeth:
O God! O Montreal!”

Samuel Butler

A Psalm of Montreal http://www.geocities.com/~bblair/011204.htm, st. 1 (1884)

“There can be no covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can never be of one mind, but hate each other out and out an through.”

Samuel Butler

The Iliad of Homer, Rendered into English Prose (1898), Book XXII

“Words impede and either kill, or are killed by, perfect thought; but they are, as a scaffolding, useful, if not indispensable, for the building up of imperfect thought and helping to perfect it.”

Samuel Butler

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

“The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it.”

Samuel Butler

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

“If I die prematurely, at any rate I shall be saved from being bored by my own success.”

Samuel Butler

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

“The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.”

Samuel Butler

The Fair Haven http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/fhvn10h.htm, Memoir of the Late John Pickard Owen, Ch. 3 (1873)

“Our choice is apparently most free, and we are least obviously driven to determine our course, in those cases where the future is most obscure, that is, when the balance of advantage appears most doubtful.”

Samuel Butler

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

“A man is the resultant and exponent of all the forces that have been brought to bear upon him, whether before his birth or afterwards. His action at any moment depends solely upon his constitution, and on the intensity and direction of the various agencies to which he is, and has been, subjected. Some of these will counteract each other; but as he is by nature, and as he has been acted on, and is now acted on from without, so will he do, as certainly and regularly as though he were a machine.
We do not generally admit this, because we do not know the whole nature of any one, nor the whole of the forces that act upon him. We see but a part, and being thus unable to generalise human conduct, except very roughly, we deny that it is subject to any fixed laws at all, and ascribe much both of a man’s character and actions to chance, or luck, or fortune; but these are only words whereby we escape the admission of our own ignorance; and a little reflection will teach us that the most daring flight of the imagination or the most subtle exercise of the reason is as much the thing that must arise, and the only thing that can by any possibility arise, at the moment of its arising, as the falling of a dead leaf when the wind shakes it from the tree.”

Samuel Butler

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 25

“I doubt whether any angel would find me very entertaining. As for myself, if ever I do entertain one it will have to be unawares. When people entertain others without an introduction they generally turn out more like devils than angels.”

Samuel Butler

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

“When he had left the room, I mused over the conversation which had just taken place between us, but I could make nothing out of it, except that it argued an even greater perversity of mental vision than I had been yet prepared for. And this made me wretched; for I cannot bear having much to do with people who think differently from myself.”

Samuel Butler

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 9

“Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch cold on over-exposure.”

Samuel Butler

Truth, vii
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIX - Truth and Convenience

“The Discobolus is put here because he is vulgar —
He has neither vest nor pants with which to cover his limbs.”

Samuel Butler

A Psalm of Montreal, st. 5

“Life is the gathering of waves to a head, at death they break into a million fragments each one of which, however, is absorbed at once into the sea of life and helps to form a later generation which comes rolling on till it too breaks.”

Samuel Butler

Birth and Death, ii
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part I - Lord, What is Man?

“The pursuit of truth is chimerical. That is why it is so hard to say what truth is. There is no permanent absolute unchangeable truth; what we should pursue is the most convenient arrangement of our ideas.”

Samuel Butler

Truth, ii
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIX - Truth and Convenience

“We are so far identical with our ancestors and our contemporaries that it is very rarely we can see anything that they do not see. It is not unjust that the sins of the fathers should be visited upon the children, for the children committed the sins when in the persons of their fathers.”

Samuel Butler

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