Samuel Butler: Man

Samuel Butler was novelist. Explore interesting quotes on man.

Samuel Butler: 464 quotes13 likes

“Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.”

“All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 19

“Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

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

“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

“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

“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.”

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

“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

“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

“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

“It does not matter much what a man hates provided he hates something.”

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

“Nothing is so cruel as to try and force a man beyond his natural pace.”

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

“A lawyer's dream of heaven: every man reclaimed his own property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.”

Further Extracts from the Note-Books of Samuel Butler http://books.google.pt/books?id=zltaAAAAMAAJ&q=%22A+lawyer's+dream+of+heaven:%22&dq=%22A+lawyer's+dream+of+heaven:%22&hl=pt-PT&sa=X&ei=_LPRUvmtGa_b7AbdjoCADQ&ved=0CFgQ6AEwBjgK, compiled and edited by ‎A.T. Bartholomew (1934), p. 27

“Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.”

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

“No one with any sense of self-respect will place himself on an equality in the matter of affection with those who are less lucky than himself in birth, health, money, good looks, capacity, or anything else. Indeed, that dislike and even disgust should be felt by the fortunate for the unfortunate, or at any rate for those who have been discovered to have met with any of the more serious and less familiar misfortunes, is not only natural, but desirable for any society, whether of man or brute.”

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 10

“When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.”

Writing for a Hundred Years Hence
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VII - On the Making of Music, Pictures, and Books

“We take it that when the state of things shall have arrived which we have been above attempting to describe, man will have become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man. He will continue to exist, nay even to improve, and will be probably better off in his state of domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than he is in his present wild state. We treat our horses, dogs, cattle and sheep, on the whole, with great kindness, we give them whatever experience teaches us to be best for them, and there can be no doubt that our use of meat has added to the happiness of the lower animals far more than it has detracted from it; in like manner it is reasonable to suppose that the machines will treat us kindly, for their existence is as dependent upon ours as ours is upon the lower animals.”

Darwin Among the Machines
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part III - The Germs of Erewhon and of Life and Habit

“There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.”

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

“If it be urged that the action of the potato is chemical and mechanical only, and that it is due to the chemical and mechanical effects of light and heat, the answer would seem to lie in an inquiry whether every sensation is not chemical and mechanical in its operation? whether those things which we deem most purely spiritual are anything but disturbances of equilibrium in an infinite series of levers, beginning with those that are too small for microscopic detection, and going up to the human arm and the appliances which it makes use of? whether there be not a molecular action of thought, whence a dynamical theory of the passions shall be deducible? Whether strictly speaking we should not ask what kind of levers a man is made of rather than what is his temperament? How are they balanced? How much of such and such will it take to weigh them down so as to make him do so and so?”

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 23