Quotes from book
The Way of All Flesh

Name: The Way of All Flesh
Author: Samuel Butler

The Way of All Flesh is a semi-autobiographical novel by Samuel Butler that attacks Victorian-era hypocrisy. Written between 1873 and 1884, it traces four generations of the Pontifex family. Butler dared not publish it during his lifetime, but when it was published it was accepted as part of the general reaction against Victorianism.

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

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 24

“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.

“All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Life, xvi
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part I - Lord, What is Man?
Source: The Way of All Flesh

“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

“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

“How is it, I wonder, that all religious officials, from God the Father to the parish beadle, should be so arbitrary and exacting.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 23; this is one of the passages excised from <cite>The Way of All Flesh</cite> when it was first published in 1903, after Butler's death, by his literary executor, R. Streatfeild. This first edition of <cite>The Way of All Flesh</cite> is widely available in plain text on the internet, but readers of facsimiles of the first edition should be aware that Streatfeild significantly altered and edited Butler's text, "regularizing" the punctuation and removing most of Butler's most trenchant criticism of Victorian society and conventional pieties. Butler's full manuscript, entitled <cite>Ernest Pontifex, or The Way of All Flesh</cite>, was edited and issued by Daniel F. Howard in 1965. It is from this edition that this quote is derived; it was excised by Streatfeild in the first edition.

“Taking numbers into account, I should think more mental suffering had been undergone in the streets leading from St George’s, Hanover Square, than in the condemned cells of Newgate.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 13

“An empty house is like a stray dog or a body from which life has departed.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 72

“One great reason why clergymen’s households are generally unhappy is because the clergyman is so much at home or close about the house.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 24

“To me it seems that those who are happy in this world are better and more lovable people than those who are not.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 26

“It is far safer to know too little than too much. People will condemn the one, though they will resent being called upon to exert themselves to follow the other.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

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

“Youth is like spring, an overpraised season.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 6

“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

“A pair of lovers are like sunset and sunrise: there are such things every day but we very seldom see them.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 11

“We know so well what we are doing ourselves and why we do it, do we not? I fancy that there is some truth in the view which is being put forward nowadays, that it is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

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

“The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Ch. 39 http://books.google.com/books?id=wZAEAQAAIAAJ&q=%22The+best+liar+is+he+who+makes+the+smallest+amount+of+lying+go+the+longest+way%22&pg=PA190#v=onepage <br class="br">The Way of All Flesh (1903)

“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

“The advantage of doing one’s praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 34

“It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma or want of dogma that the danger lies.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Ch. 67 http://books.google.com/books?id=wZAEAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA338 <br class="br">The Way of All Flesh (1903) <br class="br">Context: As the days went slowly by he came to see that Christianity and the denial of Christianity after all met as much as any other extremes do; it was a fight about names — not about things; practically the Church of Rome, the Church of England, and the freethinker have the same ideal standard and meet in the gentleman; for he is the most perfect saint who is the most perfect gentleman. Then he saw also that it matters little what profession, whether of religion or irreligion, a man may make, provided only he follows it out with charitable inconsistency, and without insisting on it to the bitter end. It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma or want of dogma that the danger lies.