Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.
Samuel ButlerRead
Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Life is a continual learning process where we adapt and improve as we go.
This quote suggests that living life is akin to performing a complex task, such as playing the violin, in front of an audience without complete mastery of the skills required. It reflects the idea that individuals often learn and grow from their experiences as they navigate through challenges, highlighting the importance of adaptability and the journey of self-improvement.
Themes
LifeLearningAdventureGrowthAdaptation
In practice
Example use cases
A speaker at a graduation ceremony might use this quote to inspire students about the journey ahead.
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
I don't understand anything. Life is so strange. I feel like some one who's lived all his life by a duck-pond and suddenly is shown the sea. It makes me a little breathless, and yet it fills me with elation. I don't want to die, I want to live. I'm beginning to feel a new courage. I feel like one of those old sailors who set sail for undiscovered seas and I think my soul hankers for the unknown.
W. Somerset MaughamRead
Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled.
Katherine Anne PorterRead
The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop, The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.
Edward FitzgeraldRead
Human life runs its course in the metamorphosis between receiving and giving.
Johann Wolfgang Von GoetheRead
What is poor? We had food. We dressed well. We didn't have a lot, but what we had fit, and it was always neat.
Walter PaytonRead
From the time an Aiel boy becomes a man he will not sing anything but battle chants, or their dirge for the slain. I have heard them singing over their dead, and over those they have killed. That song is one to make the stones weep.
Robert JordanRead