Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.
Samuel ButlerRead
When you have told anyone you have left him a legacy, the only decent thing to do is die at once.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that declaring a legacy before your death is insincere unless you follow through with your demise immediately.
Samuel Butler's quote reflects the irony inherent in the concept of leaving a legacy. It implies that proclaiming a legacy while still alive undermines the value of what one leaves behind, as true worth is often found in humility and the absence of self-promotion. In Butler's view, the act of announcing a legacy can be a way of seeking validation and attention rather than genuinely contributing to the world's betterment, hence the notion that one might as well die if they intend to make such a statement.
Themes
LegacyDeathIronyHumilitySelf-Promotion
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in a speech about the importance of humility in leadership.
More from Samuel Butler
All quotes βTo know God better is only to realize how impossible it is that we should ever know him at all. I know not which is more childish to deny him, or define him.
Samuel ButlerRead
Academic and aristocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that common sense can rarely reach them.
Samuel ButlerRead
An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.
Samuel ButlerRead
Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.
Samuel ButlerRead
People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable.
Samuel ButlerRead
Similar quotes
The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it
George Bernard ShawRead
Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.
Richard DawkinsRead
Evolutionary naturalism takes the inherent limitations of science and turns them into a devastating philosophical weapon: because science is our only real way of knowing anything, what science cannot know cannot be real.
Phillip E. JohnsonRead
By philosophy the mind of man comes to itself, and from henceforth rests on itself without foreign aid, and is completely master of itself, as the dancer of his feet, or the boxer of his hands.
Johann Gottlieb FichteRead
But suppose one doesn't quite know which one wants to put first. Suppose," said Harriet, falling back on words which were not her own, "suppose one is cursed with both a heart and a brain?" "You can usually tell," said Miss de Vine, "by seeing what kind of mistakes you make. I'm quite sure that one never makes fundamental mistakes about the thing one really wants to do. Fundamental mistakes arise out of lack of genuine interest. In my opinion, that is.
Dorothy L. SayersRead
To like an individual because he's black is just as insulting as to dislike him because he isn't white.
E. E. CummingsRead