Samuel Butler (novelist) quotes - page 9

Animals and plants cannot understand our business, so we have denied that they can understand their own. (Samuel Butler (novelist))
Critics generally come to be critics by reason not of their fitness for this but of their unfitness for anything else. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
It is love that alone gives life, and the truest life is that which we live not in ourselves but vicariously in others, and with which we have no concern. Our concern is so to order ourselves that we may be of the number of them that enter into life - although we know it not. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to them. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
All men can do great things, if they know what great things are. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
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. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
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. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
Feeling is an art and, like any other art, can be acquired by taking pains. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
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. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
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. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
An energy is a soul - a something working in us. (Samuel Butler (novelist))
Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers. Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
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. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
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. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
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. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
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. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
After having spent years striving to be accurate, we must spend as many more in discovering when and how to be inaccurate. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
When I am dead I would rather people thought me better than I was instead of worse; but if they think me worse, I cannot help it and, if it matters at all, it will matter more to them than to me. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
No Erewhonian believes that the world is as black as it has been here painted, but it is one of their peculiarities that they very often do not believe or mean things which they profess to regard as indisputable. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
As a matter of course, the basis on which he decided that duty could alone rest was one that afforded no standing-room for many of the old-established habits of the people. These, he assured them, were all wrong, and whenever any one ventured to differ from him, he referred the matter to the unseen power with which he alone was in direct communication, and the unseen power invariably assured him that he was right. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
[Ideas] are like shadows - substantial enough until we try to grasp them. (Samuel Butler (novelist))
Thought pure and simple is as near to God as we can get; it is through this that we are linked with God. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
Heaven is the work of the best and kindest men and women. Hell is the work of prigs, pedants and professional truth-tellers. The world is an attempt to make the best of both. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
The greatest poets never write poetry. The Homers and Shakespeares are not the greatest - they are only the greatest that we can know. And so with Handel among musicians. For the highest poetry, whether in music or literature, is ineffable - it must be felt from one person to another, it cannot be articulated. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race. If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)