Blog

I really do not see much use in exalting the humble and meek; they do not remain humble and meek long when they are exalted.

❀

The extremes of virtue, like those of vice, should not be even named: firstly, because half the virtue goes when a thing is talked about, and secondly because a sight of the highest peaks of virtue depresses average climbers more than it stimulates them. Those climb best who look not so much upwards as under their feet, with an occasional glance downwards, over their whole journey.

❀

The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.

❀

A man may well fear for the permanency of his own original work, but if he has made a readable translation from a great work that is worth translating he may be sure that it will not be lost sight of. I do not say that this consideration led me to try my hand at the Odyssey, for it was not consideration at all but inability to resist the charm of the work that made me do it; but it consoles me on having offered to make a present of my translation to any publisher that will print it, and after trying all the best, finding that not one of them will take the work even on those terms.

❀

There are two great enemies to the well-being of any art, science, or system with which they are connected — those who despise its technicalities habitually, and those who do not know how, occasionally, to despise them. Of the two these last are the most dangerous, as being the most respectable.

❀

The test of a good critic is whether he knows when and how to believe on insufficient evidence.

❀

One of the most fashionable subterfuges nowadays is the demand for more evidence upon points where no more evidence is wanted by a sensible non-combatant. Sneer down existing evidence; demand more facts; say, to save appearances, that no doubt the thing ought to be considered, but be careful to avoid considering it.

❀

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

❀

One of the chief arts is that of knowing what to neglect, and the more talk increases the more necessary does this art become.

❀

Vaccination is the medical sacrament corresponding to baptism. Whether it is or is not more efficacious I do not know.

❀

God. He is like the sun; we come from him and we shall go to him; we owe him all things, but there is no use in praying to him, and it does not matter how much we abuse him.

(Further Selections from The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, 1934).

The whole art of life consists in knowing how to draw lines, and no one knows how to draw them in respect of more than one or two things.

❀

Men who get misled by schools and academies begin by wanting to do and not knowing how, and end by knowing how and not wanting.

❀

Any fool can paint a picture but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it.

❀

I do not greatly care whether I have been right or wrong on any point, but I care a good deal about knowing which of the two I have been.

❀

I said somewhere about myself, but I forgot where: ‘I attacked the foundations of morality in Erewhon, and nobody cared two straws. I tore open the wounds of my Redeemer as he hung upon the Cross in The Fair Haven, and people rather liked it. But when I attacked Mr. Darwin they were up in arms in a moment.’

❀

After all, what is the essence of Christianity? What is the kernel of the nut? Surely common sense and cheerfulness, with unflinching opposition to the charlatanisms and Pharisaisms of a man’s own times. The essence of Christianity lies neither in dogma, nor yet, in abnormally holy life, but in faith in an unseen world, in doing one’s duty, in speaking the truth, in finding the true life rather in others than in oneself, and in the certain hope that he who loses his life on these behalfs finds more than he has lost.

❀

The tendency of modern science is to reduce proof to an absurdity, by so continually reducing absurdity to proof, or pretending to do so.

(Further Selections from The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, 1934).

Why does the fresh fallen August snow lie so long on the top of that high peak when it is so thin and the weather is so hot? I suppose because it is not thin, and because the weather up there is not hot, and because it does not lie long.

❀

‘Scientific’ to men like Herbert Spencer, means little else than the power to say in hard words and involved sentences what could be better said in easy ones.

❀

If a man wants to break any habit he had far better do it gradually than suddenly. In the gradual leaving off there is not likely to be a relapse. In the sudden there is almost sure to be, and with relapse demoralization.

❀

A man may say what he likes about Christ, but he must be very careful how he attacks Mr. Darwin or indeed any of the scientific or literary bigwigs.

❀

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Certainly, but a little want of knowledge is also a dangerous thing.

❀

Our latest moment is always our supreme moment. Five minutes delay in dinner now is more important than a great sorrow ten years gone.

❀

Some draw distinctions without differences; with others no amount of difference would make them draw a distinction.

❀

By faith a man can even read Herbert Spencer.

(Further Selections from The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, 1934).

Classification depends upon the shock of the mind which the perception of a difference occasions. The shock depends upon the amount of the difference. It is analogous to a man’s running up against an object and being suddenly stopped by it. Much depends upon the being prepared or unprepared for the shock. We cannot classify things, but we can classify the amount and character of the shocks which the sense of differences between them will cause to the average of mankind.

❀

There is no such metaphysics as physics in the hands of a scientist who goes too far for his facts.

❀

There is no such change as changelessness under changed surroundings.

❀

Unnatural. Men misuse this word as they do the word ‘spontaneous’ — as though anything which is a part of nature could be ‘unnatural.’ Whatever is, is natural. Instead of saying ‘unnatural’ they should say ‘unintelligible to myself,’ ‘disgusting,’ or what not.

❀

Dionigi Negri of Varallo writing to me once about the priests said they were a shield and bulwark against the excesses of ignorant democracy. I am for playing the one against the other. I regard democracy and science as a bulwark against the tyranny of an arrogant priesthood, and the priesthood as a bulwark against the arrogance of democracy and science. It is a pity, however, that priests do not study science and philosophy more; they would be able to deal with it much more effectually if they did; so again it is a pity that men of science do not know more about theology — but I am not so sure about this.

(Further Selections from The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, 1934).

“A few summers ago I spent a happy week at the famous Assembly Grounds on the borders of Chautauqua Lake. The moment one treads that sacred enclosure, one feels one’s self in an atmosphere of success. Sobriety and industry, intelligence and goodness, orderliness and ideality, prosperity and cheerfulness, pervade the air. It is a serious and studious picnic on a gigantic scale. Here you have a town of many thousands of inhabitants, beautifully laid out in the forest and drained, and equipped with means for satisfying all the necessary lower and most of the superfluous higher wants of man. You have a first-class college in full blast. You have magnificent music-a chorus of seven hundred voices, with possibly the most perfect open-air auditorium in the world. You have every sort of athletic exercise from sailing, rowing, swimming, bicycling, to the ball-field and the more artificial doings which the gymnasium affords. You have kindergartens and model secondary schools. You have general religious services and special club-houses for the several sects. You have perpetually running soda-water fountains, and daily popular lectures by distinguished men. You have the best of company, and yet no effort. You have no zymotic diseases, no poverty, no drunkenness, no crime, no police. You have culture, you have kindness, you have cheapness, you have equality, you have the best fruits of what mankind has fought and bled and striven for under the name of civilization for centuries. You have, in short, a foretaste of what human society might be, were it all in the light, with no suffering and no dark corners.

“I went in curiosity for a day. I stayed for a week, held spell-bound by the charm and ease of everything, by the middle-class paradise, without a sin, without a victim, without a blot, without a tear.

“And yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily saying: “Ouf! what a relief! Now for something primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the balance straight again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate, this goodness too uninspiring. This human drama without a villain or a pang; this community so refined that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost offering it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things, — I cannot abide with them. Let me take my chances again in the big outside worldly wilderness with all its sins and sufferings. There are the heights and depths, the precipices and the steep ideals, the gleams of the awful and the infinite; and there is more hope and help a thousand times than in this dead level and quintessence of every mediocrity.”

“Such was the sudden right-about-face performed for me by my lawless fancy! There had been spread before me the realization — on a small, sample scale of course — of all the ideals for which our civilization has been striving: security, intelligence, humanity, and order; and here was the instinctive hostile reaction, not of the natural man, but of a so-called cultivated man upon such a Utopia. There seemed thus to be a self-contradiction and paradox somewhere, which I, as a professor drawing a full salary, was in duty bound to unravel and explain, if I could.

“So I meditated. And, first of all, I asked myself what the thing was that was so lacking in this Sabbatical city, and the lack of which kept one forever falling short of the higher sort of contentment. And I soon recognized that it was the element that gives to the wicked outer world all its moral style, expressiveness and picturesqueness, — the element of precipitousness, so to call it, of strength and strenuousness, intensity and danger. What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism, reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death. But in this unspeakable Chautauqua there was no potentiality of death in sight anywhere, and no point of the compass visible from which danger might possibly appear. The ideal was so completely victorious already that no sign of any previous battle remained, the place just resting on its oars. But what our human emotions seem to require is the sight of the struggle going on. The moment the fruits are being merely eaten, things become ignoble. Sweat and effort, human nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack, yet getting through alive, and then turning its back on its success to pursue another more rare and arduous still-this is the sort of thing the presence of which inspires us, and the reality of which it seems to be the function of all the higher forms of literature and fine art to bring home to us and suggest. At Chautauqua there were no racks, even in the place’s historical museum; and no sweat, except possibly the gentle moisture on the brow of some lecturer, or on the sides of some player in the ball-field.” (William James’s “What Makes a Life Significant,” Talks to Teachers, 1899)

“In some sciences, the endeavor to discover a universal principle may often be just as fruitless as the endeavor of a mineralogist to discover some primary universal element through the compounding of which all minerals arose. Nature creates neither genera nor species, but individua, and in our shortsightedness, we must seek out similarities to be able to retain many things simultaneously. These concepts become more and more inaccurate the broader the categories are which we create.” (Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, 1765)

“God does not contemplate the human race in general. At a single glance he takes in every human being separately, and in each he sees the resemblances that make him like all the others and the differences that set him apart. God therefore has no need of general ideas; that is, he never feels the need to subsume a very large number of analogous objects under a single form in order to think about them in a more convenient way. This is not the case with man. If the human mind undertook to examine and judge individually all the particular cases that come to its notice, it would soon become lost in a sea of detail and cease to see anything. In this extremity it has recourse to an imperfect but necessary procedure that is as much a proof of its weakness as a compensation for it.” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835)

“How loosely our thoughts must hang together when the whiff of a smell, a band playing in the street, a face seen in the fire, or on the gnarled stem of a tree, will lead them into such vagaries at a moment’s warning.”

“Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.”

“A sense of humour keen enough to show a man his own absurdities, as well as those of other people, will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those that are worth committing.”

“There are two great rules of life, the one general and the other particular. The first is that every one can, in the end, get what he wants if he only tries. This is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is, more or less, an exception to the general rule.”

“Nature is essentially mean, mediocre. You can have schemes for raising the level of this mean, but not for making every one two inches taller than his neighbour, and this is what people really care about.”

“The world will always be governed by self-interest. We should not try to stop this, we should try to make the self-interest of cads a little more coincident with that of decent people.”

“Lucky and Unlucky. People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.”

“A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.”

“Oxford and Cambridge. The dons are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.”

“Professional truth-tellers may be trusted to profess that they are telling the truth.”

“A little boy and a little girl were looking at a picture of Adam and Eve. ‘Which is Adam and which is Eve?’ said one. ‘I do not know,’ said the other, ‘but I could tell if they had their clothes on.’”

“The firmest line that can be drawn upon the smoothest paper has still jagged edges if seen through a microscope. This does not matter until important deductions are made on the supposition that there are no jagged edges.” (The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, 1912).

“He who finds himself inconvenienced by knowing too little can go to the British Museum, or to the Working Men’s College, and learn more; but when a thing is once well learnt it is even harder to unlearn it than it was to learn it. Would it be possible to unlearn the art of speech or the arts of reading and writing even if we wished to do so? Wisdom and knowledge are, like a bad reputation, more easily won than lost; we got on fairly well without knowing that the earth went round the sun; we thought the sun went round the earth until we found it made us uncomfortable to think so any longer, then we altered our opinion; it was not very easy to alter it, but it was easier than it would be to alter it back again. Vestigia nulla retrorsum; the earth itself does not pursue its course more steadily than mind does when it has once committed itself, and if we could see the movements of the stars in slow time we should probably find that there was much more throb and tremor in detail than we can take note of.

“How, I wonder, will it be if in our pursuit of knowledge we stumble upon some awkward fact as disturbing for the human race as an enquiry into the state of his own finances may sometimes prove to the individual? The pursuit of knowledge can never be anything but a leap in the dark, and a leap in the dark is a very uncomfortable thing. I have sometimes thought that if the human race ever loses its ascendancy it will not be through plague, famine or cataclysm, but by getting to know some little microbe, as it were, of knowledge which shall get into its system and breed there till it makes an end of us. It is well, therefore, that there should be a substratum of mankind who cannot by any inducement be persuaded to know anything whatever at all, and who are resolutely determined to know nothing among us but what the parson tells them, and not to be too sure even about that.” (The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, 1912).

“Among all the evidences for the existence of an overruling Providence that I can discover, I see none more convincing than the elaborate and for the most part effectual provision that has been made for the suppression of genius. The more I see of the world, the more necessary I see it to be that by far the greater part of what is written or done should be of so fleeting a character as to take itself away quickly. That is the advantage in the fact that so much of our literature is journalism.

“Schools and colleges are not intended to foster genius and to bring it out. Genius is a nuisance, and it is the duty of schools and colleges to abate it by setting genius-traps in its way. They are as the artificial obstructions in a hurdle race — tests of skill and endurance, but in themselves useless. Still, so necessary is it that genius and originality should be abated that, did not academies exist, we should have had to invent them.” (The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, 1912).