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The Note-Books of Samuel Butler

Samuel Butler

Book Overview: 

Early in his life Samuel Butler began to carry a note-book and to write down in it anything he wanted to remember; it might be something he heard some one say, more commonly it was something he said himself. In one of these notes he gives a reason for making them:

“One’s thoughts fly so fast that one must shoot them; it is no use trying to put salt on their tails.”

So he bagged as many as he could hit and preserved them, re-written on loose sheets of paper which constituted a sort of museum stored with the wise, beautiful, and strange creatures that were continually winging their way across the field of his vision. As he became a more expert marksman his collection increased and his museum grew so crowded that he wanted a catalogue.

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Book Excerpt: 
. . .There is no absolute heat, life, certainty, union, nor is there any absolute cold, death, uncertainty or separateness.

We can conceive of no ultimate limit beyond which a thing cannot become either hotter or colder, there is no limit; there are degrees of heat and cold, but there is no heat so great that we cannot fancy its becoming a little hotter, that is we cannot fancy its not having still a few degrees of cold in it which can be extracted.  Heat and cold are always relative to one another, they are never absolute.  So with life and death, there is neither perfect life nor perfect death, but in the highest life there is some death and in the lowest death there is still some life.  The fraction is so small that in practice it may and must be neglected; it is neglected, however, not as of right but as of grace, and the right to insist on it is never finally and indefeasibly waived.

iii

An energy is a soul - a something working in us. . . Read More

Community Reviews

I loved Samuel Butler's ideas about technology that he expressed in Erewhon. I was curious what other kinds of things he thought about. The answer is, he thought a little about everything. He was a dabbler in every subject. He had a lot of intelligent things to say about painting, and in fact intend

I bought this after reading that F Scott Fitzgerald
considered this book a major influence for his own writing habits. A good nightstand book to flip through rather than read all at once.

it is an amazing story shows you how much pain the battle can be between your heart and mind , amazing how it ended i just like it

Aphoristic, brilliant, ironic. The author of Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh was a keen, and sardonic, reader and observer. Besides skewering pretense and selfishness in all its forms, he offers unusual takes on inantimate objects. Illustrative snippet: "[Such] a tool as a locomotive engine, appare