Samuel Butler: Man (page 2)

Samuel Butler was novelist. Explore interesting quotes on man.
Samuel Butler: 464   quotes 5   likes

“A man can stand being told that he must submit to a severe surgical operation, or that he has some disease which will shortly kill him, or that he will be a cripple or blind for the rest of his life; dreadful as such tidings must be, we do not find that they unnerve the greatest number of mankind; most men, indeed, go coolly enough even to be hanged, but the strongest quail before financial ruin, and the better men they are, the more complete, as a general rule, is their prostration.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 66

Life , Men , Disease

“To do great work a man must be very idle as well as very industrious.”

Samuel Butler

Further Extracts from the Note-Books of Samuel Butler http://books.google.com/books?id=zltaAAAAMAAJ&q="To+do+great+work+a+man+must+be+very+idle+as+well+as+very+industrious"&pg=PA262#v=onepage, compiled and edited by A.T. Bartholomew (1934), p. 262

“The great characters of fiction live as truly as the memories of dead men. For the life after death it is not necessary that a man or woman should have lived.”

Samuel Butler

Hamlet, Don Quixote, Mr. Pickwick and others
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy

Life , Death , Men , Memory

“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)

God , Beauty

“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)

“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

Law , Exercises , Imagination , Birth

“The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable; absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullnesses of it and the pomposities of it.”

Samuel Butler

Vice and Virtue, ii
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part II - Elementary Morality

“If a man has not studied painting, or at any rate black and white drawing, his eyes are wild; learning to draw tames them. The first step towards taming the eyes is to teach them not to see too much.”

Samuel Butler

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

Study , Learning , Drawing , Painting

“One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once.”

Samuel Butler

Samuel Butler's Notebooks http://books.google.com/books?id=cjk3AAAAIAAJ&q=%22One+of+the+first+businesses+of+a+sensible+man+is+to+know+when+he+is+beaten+and+to+leave+off+fighting+at+once%22&pg=PA186#v=onepage (1951)

Business , Fight

“Adversity, if a man is set down to it by degrees, is more supportable with equanimity by most people than any great prosperity arrived at in a single lifetime.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 5

People , Support

“A man’s style in any art should be like his dress — it should attract as little attention as possible.”

Samuel Butler

A Man's Style
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VII - On the Making of Music, Pictures, and Books

Art

“They say the test of this [literary power] is whether a man can write an inscription. I say “Can he name a kitten?” And by this test I am condemned, for I cannot.”

Samuel Butler

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

“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.”

Samuel Butler

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 22

Business , Thinking , Help , Personality

“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

Music , Appearance , Literature