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Samuel Butler byl anglický spisovatel a překladatel. Studoval na univerzitě v Cambridge a nejdříve se připravoval na dráhu anglikánského duchovního. Pochybnosti o víře jej však přiměly, aby svůj záměr opustil a roku 1859 odjel na Nový Zéland. Zde založil ovčí farmu, jejímž prodejem později vydělal menší jmění, a začal literárně tvořit. Do Anglie se vrátil roku 1864 a natrvalo se usadil v Londýně. Roku 1872 vydal anonymně utopický román Erewhon, jímž se etabloval jako spisovatel. Nikdy se neoženil.

Samuel Butler byl prvním myslitelem, který uvažoval o možnosti, že by stroje mohly cestou darwinovského výběru vyvinout vědomí. Wikipedia  

✵ 4. prosinec 1835 – 18. červen 1902
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Samuel Butler: 235   citátů 8   lajků

Samuel Butler nejznámější citáty

„Přátelství je jako peníze, snáze se vydělává než udržuje.“

Samuel Butler

„Učitelé vysokých škol jsou příliš zaměstnáni vzděláváním mladých mužů, než aby je něco naučili.“

Samuel Butler

Zdroj: Vaněk, Zdeněk, Kaleidoskop, Zdeněk Vaněk, Plzeň, 2009, 1, 420, 978-80-254-5071-0, http://kaleidoskop.webz.cz/Kaleidoskop.pdf, 37

Samuel Butler: Citáty anglicky

“After having spent years striving to be accurate, we must spend as many more in discovering when and how to be inaccurate.”

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Samuel Butler

Accuracy
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part IX - A Painter's Views on Painting

“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.”

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Samuel Butler

Apologia, i
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XXIV - The Life of the World to Come

“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.”

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Samuel Butler

Zdroj: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 20

“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.”

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Samuel Butler

Zdroj: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 26

“[Ideas] are like shadows — substantial enough until we try to grasp them.”

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Samuel Butler

Ideas
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VII - On the Making of Music, Pictures, and Books

“Thought pure and simple is as near to God as we can get; it is through this that we are linked with God.”

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Samuel Butler

Thought and Word, i
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VII - On the Making of Music, Pictures, and Books

“We can see nothing face to face; our utmost seeing is but a fumbling of blind finger-ends in an overcrowded pocket.”

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Samuel Butler

Ramblings In Cheapside (1890)

“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.”

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Samuel Butler

Heaven and Hell
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part II - Elementary Morality

“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.”

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Samuel Butler

Poetry
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XII - The Enfant Terrible of Literature

“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.”

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Samuel Butler

Darwin Among the Machines
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part III - The Germs of Erewhon and of Life and Habit

“God's merits are so transcendent that it is not surprising his faults should be in reasonable proportion.”

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Samuel Butler

"Rebelliousness", Note-Books (1912)

“Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. If you look at it to admire it you are lost.”

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Samuel Butler

Improvement in Art
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part IX - A Painter's Views on Painting

“Italians, and perhaps Frenchmen, consider first whether they like or want to do a thing and then whether, on the whole, it will do them any harm. Englishmen, and perhaps Germans, consider first whether they ought to like a thing and often never reach the questions whether they do like it and whether it will hurt. There is much to be said for both systems, but I suppose it is best to combine them as far as possible.”

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Samuel Butler

Italians and Englishmen
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIII - Unprofessional Sermons

“Art has no end in view save the emphasising and recording in the most effective way some strongly felt interest or affection.”

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Samuel Butler

Great Art and Sham Art
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part IX - A Painter's Views on Painting

“He is greatest who is most often in men’s good thoughts.”

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Samuel Butler

Greatness
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy

“Always eat grapes downwards — that is, always eat the best grape first; in this way there will be none better left on the bunch, and each grape will seem good down to the last.”

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Samuel Butler

Eating Grapes Downwards
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VII - On the Making of Music, Pictures, and Books

“And should we not be guilty of consummate folly if we were to reject advantages which we cannot obtain otherwise, merely because they involve a greater gain to others than to ourselves?”

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Samuel Butler

Zdroj: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 25

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

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Samuel Butler

Oxford and Cambridge
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy

“How is it, I wonder, that all religious officials, from God the Father to the parish beadle, should be so arbitrary and exacting.”

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Samuel Butler kniha The Way of All Flesh

Zdroj: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 23; this is one of the passages excised from <cite>The Way of All Flesh</cite> when it was first published in 1903, after Butler's death, by his literary executor, R. Streatfeild. This first edition of <cite>The Way of All Flesh</cite> is widely available in plain text on the internet, but readers of facsimiles of the first edition should be aware that Streatfeild significantly altered and edited Butler's text, "regularizing" the punctuation and removing most of Butler's most trenchant criticism of Victorian society and conventional pieties. Butler's full manuscript, entitled <cite>Ernest Pontifex, or The Way of All Flesh</cite>, was edited and issued by Daniel F. Howard in 1965. It is from this edition that this quote is derived; it was excised by Streatfeild in the first edition.

“Taking numbers into account, I should think more mental suffering had been undergone in the streets leading from St George’s, Hanover Square, than in the condemned cells of Newgate.”

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Samuel Butler kniha The Way of All Flesh

Zdroj: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 13

“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.”

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Samuel Butler

Lucky and Unlucky
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy

“An empty house is like a stray dog or a body from which life has departed.”

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Samuel Butler kniha The Way of All Flesh

Zdroj: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 72

“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.”

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Samuel Butler

Thought and Word, iv
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VII - On the Making of Music, Pictures, and Books

“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.”

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Samuel Butler

Inaccuracy
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XXII - Reconciliation

“Morality turns on whether the pleasure precedes or follows the pain. Thus, it is immoral to get drunk because the headache comes after the drinking, but if the headache came first, and the drunkenness afterwards, it would be moral to get drunk.”

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Samuel Butler

Morality
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part II - Elementary Morality

“For property is robbery, but then, we are all robbers or would-be robbers together, and have found it essential to organise our thieving, as we have found it necessary to organise our lust and our revenge. Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.”

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Samuel Butler

Zdroj: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 12

“I do not like books. I believe I have the smallest library of any literary man in London, and I have no wish to increase it. I keep my books at the British Museum and at Mudie's, and it makes me very angry if anyone gives me one for my private library.”

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Samuel Butler

Ramblings In Cheapside (1890)

“Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.”

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Samuel Butler

As quoted in 1,911 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (1988) by Robert Byrne

“I should not advise anyone with ordinary independence of mind to attempt the public ear unless he is confident that he can out-lung and out-last his own generation; for if he has any force, people will and ought to be on their guard against him, inasmuch as there is no knowing where he may not take them.”

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Samuel Butler

Ramblings In Cheapside (1890)

“It is here that almost all religions go wrong. Their priests try to make us believe that they know more about the unseen world than those whose eyes are still blinded by the seen, can ever know--forgetting that while to deny the existence of an unseen kingdom is bad, to pretend that we know more about it than its bare existence is no better.”

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Samuel Butler

Zdroj: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 15