Samuel Butler idézet

oldal 2

“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.”

“Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.”

“Life is one long process of getting tired.”

“Prayers are to men as dolls are to children.”

“It must be remembered that we have only heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.”

“Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime.”

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

“To live is like to love — all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.”

“Logic is like the sword--those who appeal to it shall perish by it.”

“The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.”

“Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.”

“We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to them.”

“All men can do great things, if they know what great things are.”

“You can have all ego, or all non-ego, but in theory you cannot have half one and half the other — yet in practice this is exactly what you must have, for everything is both itself and not itself at one and the same time.”

“Every one should keep a mental waste-paper basket and the older he grows the more things he will consign to it — torn up to irrecoverable tatters.”

“An artist’s touches are sometimes no more articulate than the barking of a dog who would call attention to something without exactly knowing what. This is as it should be, and he is a great artist who can be depended on not to bark at nothing.”

“Feeling is an art and, like any other art, can be acquired by taking pains.”

“Handel and Shakespeare have left us the best that any have left us; yet, in spite of this, how much of their lives was wasted.”

“But so engrained in the human heart is the desire to believe that some people really do know what they say they know, and can thus save them from the trouble of thinking for themselves, that in a short time would-be philosophers and faddists became more powerful than ever, and gradually led their countrymen to accept all those absurd views of life.”

“A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.”

“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.”

“An energy is a soul — a something working in us.”

“Morality is the custom of one’s country and the current feeling of one’s peers. Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country.”

“If you tie Handel’s hands by debarring him from the rendering of human emotion, and if you set Bach’s free by giving him no human emotion to render — if, in fact, you rob Handel of his opportunities and Bach of his difficulties — the two men can fight after a fashion, but Handel will even so come off victorious.”

“A man’s friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage—but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.”

“Intellectual over-indulgence is the most gratuitous and disgraceful form which excess can take, nor is there any the consequences of which are more disastrous.”

“It is with philosophy as with just intonation on a piano, if you get everything quite straight and on all fours in one department, in perfect tune, it is delightful so long as you keep well in the middle of the key; but as soon as you modulate you find the new key is out of tune and the more remotely you modulate the more out of tune you get.”

“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.”