186 quotes
If people like being deceived — and this can hardly be doubted — there can rarely have been a time during which they can have had more of the wish than now. The literary, scientific and religious worlds vie with one another in trying to gratify the public.
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912)
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.
Ramblings In Cheapside (1890)
[Ideas] are like shadows — substantial enough until we try to grasp them.
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912)
Handel and William Shakespeare|Shakespeare have left us the best that any have left us; yet, in spite of this, how much of their lives was wasted.
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912)
All eating is a kind of proselytising — a kind of dogmatising — a maintaining that the eater's way of looking at things is better than the eatee's.
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912)
I am not sure that I do not begin to like the correction of a mistake, even when it involves my having shown much ignorance and stupidity, as well as I like hitting on a new idea.
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912)
We play out our days as we play out cards, taking them as they come, not knowing what they will be, hoping for a lucky card and sometimes getting one, often getting just the wrong one.
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912)
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 Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912)
In the highest consciousness there is still unconsciousness, in the lowest unconsciousness there is still consciousness. If there is no consciousness there is no thing, or nothing. To understand perfectly would be to cease to understand at all.
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912)
Most artists, whether in religion, music, literature, painting, or what not, are shopkeepers in disguise. They hide their shop as much as they can, and keep pretending that it does not exist, but they are essentially shopkeepers and nothing else.
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912)
Everything matters more than we think it does, and, at the same time, nothing matters so much as we think it does. The merest spark may set all Europe in a blaze, but though all Europe be set in a blaze twenty times over, the world will wag itself right again.
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912)
There is nothing less powerful than knowledge unattached, and incapable of application. That is why what little knowledge I have has done myself personally so much harm. I do not know much, but if I knew a good deal less than that little I should be far more powerful.
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912)
If a person would understand either the Odyssey or any other ancient work, he must never look at the dead without seeing the living in them, nor at the living without thinking of the dead. We are too fond of seeing the ancients as one thing and the moderns as another.
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912)
Ideas and opinions, like living organisms, have a normal rate of growth which cannot be either checked or forced beyond a certain point. They can be held in check more safely than they can be hurried. They can also be killed; and one of the surest ways to kill them is to try to hurry them.
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912)
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.
Erewhon (1872)
When we go up to the shelves in the reading-room of the British Museum, how like it is to wasps flying up and down an apricot tree that is trained against a wall, or cattle coming down to drink at a pool!
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912)
Stowed away in a Montreal lumber room
The Discobolus standeth and turneth his face to the wall;
Dusty, cobweb-covered, maimed and set at naught,
Beauty crieth in an attic and no man regardeth:
O God! O Montreal!
The mere fact that a thought or idea can be expressed articulately in words involves that it is still open to question; and the mere fact that a difficulty can be definitely conceived involves that it is open to solution.
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912)
As a general rule philosophy is like stirring mud or not letting a sleeping dog lie. It is an attempt to deny, circumvent or otherwise escape from the consequences of the interlacing of the roots of things with one another.
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912)
Critics generally come to be critics by reason not of their fitness for this but of their unfitness for anything else. Books should be tried by a judge and jury as though they were crimes, and counsel should be heard on both sides.
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912)