Quotes from The Way of All Flesh

“All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances. Even if they are unhappy - very unhappy - it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from finding it out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness.

To parents who wish to lead a quiet life I would say: Tell your children that they are naughty - much naughtier than most children. Point to the young people of some acquaintances as models of perfection and impress your own children with a deep sense of their own inferiority. You carry so many more guns than they do that they cannot fight you. This is called moral influence, and it will enable you to bounce them as much as you please. They think you know and they will not have yet caught you lying often enough to suspect that you are not the unworldly and scrupulously truthful person which you represent yourself to be; nor yet will they know how great a coward you are, nor how soon you will run away if they fight you with persistency and judgment. You keep the dice and throw them both for your children and yourself. Load them then, for you can easily manage to stop your children from examining them. Tell them how singularly indulgent you are; insist on the incalculable benefit you conferred upon them, firstly in bringing them into the world at all, but more particularly in bringing them into it as your own children rather than anyone else's... You hold all the trump cards, or if you do not you can filch them; if you play them with anything like judgment you will find yourselves heads of happy, united, God-fearing families... True, your children will probably find out all about it some day, but not until too late to be of much service to them or inconvenience to yourself.”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“we must judge men not so much by what they, as by what they make us feel that they have it in them to do. If a man has done enough in either painting, music, or the affairs of life, to make me feel that I might trust him in an emergency he has done enough”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“I suppose in reality not a leaf goes yellow in autumn without ceasing to care about its sap and making the parent tree very uncomfortable by long growling and grumbling - but surely nature might find some less irritating way of carrying on business if she would give her mind to it. Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow, but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before it began to live consciously on its own account?”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“To me it seems that youth is like spring, an overpraised season-- delightful if it happen to be a favoured one, but in practice very rarely favoured and more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting east winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“All our lives long, every day and every hour, we are engaged in the process of accommodating our changed and unchanged selves to changed and unchanged surroundings: living, in fact, is nothing else than this process of accommodation; when we fail in it a little we are stupid, when flagrantly we are mad, when we give up the attempt altogether we die, when we suspend it temporarily we sleep.”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“If people who are in a difficulty will only do the first little reasonable thing which they can clearly recognize as reasonable, they will always find the next step more easy both to see and take.”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“For society indeed of all sorts, except of course that of a few intimate friends, he had an unconquerable aversion. "I always did hate those people," he said, "and they always have hated and always will hate me. I am an Ihsmael by instinct as much as by accident of circumstances, but if I keep out of society I shall be less vulnerable than Ishmaels generally are. The moment a man goes into society, he becomes vulnerable all round.”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“Can anyone do much for anyone else unless by making a will in his favour and dying then and there? Should not each look after his own happiness, and will not the world be best carried on if everyone minds his own business and leaves other people to mind theirs?”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“This is why the clergyman is so often called a vicar—he being the person whose vicarious goodness is to stand for that of those entrusted to his charge. ”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“The clergyman is expected to be a kind of human Sunday.  Things must not be done in him which are venial in the week-day classes.  He is paid for this business of leading a stricter life than other people.  It is his raison d’être.  If his parishioners feel that he does this, they approve of him, for they look upon him as their own contribution towards what they deem a holy life.  This is why the clergyman is so often called a vicar—he being the person whose vicarious goodness is to stand for that of those entrusted to his charge.  But his home is his castle as much as that of any other Englishman, and with him, as with others, unnatural tension in public is followed by exhaustion when tension is no longer necessary.  His children are the most defenceless things he can reach, and it is on them in nine cases out of ten that he will relieve his mind. A”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“No boy can resist being fed well by a good-natured and still handsome woman. Boys are very like nice dogs in this respect — give them a bone and they will like you at once.”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“Why should the generations overlap one another at all?  Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow, but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before it began to live consciously on its own account? About”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“The room in fact was as depressing from its slatternliness as from its atmosphere of erudition. ”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“There are orphanages," he exclaimed to himself, "for children who have lost their parents--oh! why, why, why, are there no harbours of refuge for grown men who have not yet lost them?”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“If I had shown half as many dangerous tendencies when I was a boy, my father would have apprenticed me to a greengrocer, of that I’m very sure,”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“the principal business of life is to enjoy it.”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“It is hard enough to know whether one is happy or unhappy now, and still harder to compare the relative happiness or unhappiness of different times of one’s life; the utmost that can be said is that we are fairly happy so long as we are not distinctly aware of being miserable.”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“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, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“All young ladies are either very pretty or very clever or very sweet; they may take their choice as to which category they will go in for, but go in for one of the three they must. It was hopeless to try and pass Charlotte off as either pretty or sweet. So she became clever as the only remaining alternative.”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“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, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“boy can resist being fed well by a good-natured and still handsome woman. Boys are very like nice dogs in this respect — give them a bone and they will like you at once.”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“the baby must be either a boy or girl — this much, at any rate, was clear.”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“tailor, if he did not drink and attended to his business, could earn more money than a clerk”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“tailor, if he did not drink and attended to his business, could earn more money than a clerk or a curate, while much less expense by way of show was required of him”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“I think the Church Catechism has a good deal to do with the unhappy relations which commonly even now exist between parents and children. That work was written too exclusively from the parental point of view; the person who composed it did not get a few children to come in and help him; he was clearly not young himself, nor should I say it was the work of one who liked children — in spite of the words “my good child” which, if I remember rightly, are once put into the mouth of the catechist and, after all, carry a harsh sound with them.”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“I tell you, Edward, said my father with some severity, we must judge men not so much by what they do, as by what they make us feel that they have it in them to do. If a man has done enough, either in painting, music, or the affairs of life, to make me feel that I might trust him in an emergency, he has done enough. It is not by what a man has actually put upon his canvas, nor yet by the acts by which he has set down, so to speak, upon the canvas of his life that I will judge him, but by what he makes me feel that he felt and aimed at. If he has made me feel that he felt those things to be lovable which I hold lovable myself I ask no more.”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh

“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, quote from The Way of All Flesh

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