“The Will-be and the Has-been touch us more nearly than the Is. So we are more tender towards children and old people than to those who are in the prime of life.”

— Samuel Butler

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

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The Will-be and the Has-been touch us more nearly than the Is. So we are more tender towards children and old people th…" by Samuel Butler?

Samuel Butler photo

Samuel Butler 232

novelist 1835–1902

Related quotes

“The odds continue to be stacked against children of color who made up nearly three-quarters of all poor children in 2018. With nearly one in four poor, they are more than 2.5 times more likely to be poor than White children.”

Marian Wright Edelman (1939) American children's rights activist

Ask the Question: When Are We Going to End Child Poverty in America? in The Charleston Chronicle https://www.charlestonchronicle.net/2019/09/23/ask-the-question-when-are-we-going-to-end-child-poverty-in-america/ (23 September 2019)

“Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.”

Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy

“It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood": the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes," except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them.”

Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence

Source: The Age of Innocence (1920), Ch. 33

“those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers…”

Anna Quindlen (1952) journalist, Novelist

Source: How Reading Changed My Life

“People who can change and change again are so much more reliable and happier than those who can’t”

Stephen Fry book Moab Is My Washpot

Source: Moab Is My Washpot

“If we find, when we read again one of our classics—say Virgil for instance—that we like it better than ever, the experience may suggest an even more pleasing conjecture. Psychologists tell us that fullness of life is the goal of everything that lives, that the impulse towards completeness, towards ripeness and self-realization, is the most compelling of all motives. These discoveries in old books of new beauties and aspects of interest may persuade us, therefore, that we are not only still ourselves, but more ourselves than ever: that our spirit has not only persisted in its being, but has become more lucid in the process.”

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) British American-born writer

“Montaigne,” p. 2
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)

“In practice, the enemy has been making much more propaganda for us than we have ourselves.”

Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) Vietnamese communist leader and first president of Vietnam

Instructions Given at the Conference (Fall 1950)
1950's

“In recent times no problem has been more puzzling to thoughtful people than why, in a troubled world, we make such poor use of our affluence.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Affluent Society

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 12, Section VII, p. 145

“Nothing—so it seems to me…is more beautiful than the love that has weathered the storms of life. … The love of the young for the young, that is the beginning of life. But the love of the old for the old, that is the beginning of—of things longer.”

Jerome K. Jerome (1859–1927) English humorist

"The Passing of the Third Floor Back" (1908).

“Perhaps it is a benevolent provision of Nature that we remember more what touches than what pains us.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

Related topics