"The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period."
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Quote collection
Samuel Butler quotes (page 10 of 12)
222 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"If a man knows not life which he hath seen, how shall he know death, which he hath not seen?"
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"Our own death is a premium which we must pay for the far greater benefit we have derived from the fact that so many people have not only lived but also died before us."
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"Cat-Ideas and Mouse-Ideas. We can never get rid of mouse-ideas completely, they keep turning up again and again, and nibble, nibble-no matter how often we drive them off. The best way to keep them down is to have a few good strong cat-ideas which will embrace them and ensure their not reappearing till they do so in another shape."
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"Whereas, to borrow an illustration from mathematics, life was formerly an equation of, say, 100 unknown quantities, it is now one of 99 only, inasmuch as memory and heredity have been shown to be one and the same thing."
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"If [science] tends to thicken the crust of ice on which, as it were, we are skating, it is all right. If it tries to find, or professes to have found, the solid ground at the bottom of the water it is all wrong. Our business is with the thickening of this crust by extending our knowledge downward from above, as ice gets thicker while the frost lasts; we should not try to freeze upwards from the bottom."
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"Men of Science. If they are worthy of the name they are indeed about God's path and about his bed and spying out all his ways."
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"I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific bigwigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them."
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"Science is being daily more and more personified and anthromorphized into a god. By and by they will say that science took our nature upon him, and sent down his only begotten son, Charles Darwin, or Huxley, into the world so that those who believe in him, &c.; and they will burn people for saying that science, after all, is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance."
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"This world is like Noah's Ark. In which few men but many beasts embark."
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"In practice it is seldom very hard to do one's duty when one knows what it is, but it is sometimes extremely difficult to find this out."
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"It is death, and not what comes after death, that men are generally afraid of."
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"There are two classes [of scientists], those who want to know, and do not care whether others think they know or not, and those who do not much care about knowing, but care very greatly about being reputed as knowing."
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"History is a bucket of ashes."
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"Brigands will demand your money or your life, but a woman will demand both"
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"Since God himself cannot change the past, He is obliged to tolerate the existence of historians."
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"Don't learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world."
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"If God wants us to do a thing, he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him."
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"There is one class of mind that loves to lean on rules and definitions, and another that discards them as far as possible. A faddist will generally ask for a definition of faddism, and one who is not a faddist will be impatient of being asked to give one."
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"There is no such source of error as the pursuit of absolute truth."
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