Life is the distribution of an error — or errors.
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler
Lord, What is Man?
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler
Lord, What is Man?
Samuel Butler always carried a note-book to write down in it anything he wanted to remember
“One’s thoughts fly so fast that one must shoot them; it is no use trying to put salt on their tails”
[alluding to a folktale/superstition that sprinkling salt on a bird's tail renders the bird temporarily unable to fly, enabling its capture]
He bagged as many thoughts as he could hit and preserved them.
This blog contains some of his notes and possibly a few of mine.
Posts tagged with life
Life is not so much a riddle to be read as a Gordian knot that will get cut sooner or later.
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler
Lord, What is Man?
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler
Lord, What is Man?
The beginning of life is the beginning of an illusion to the effect that there is such a thing as free will and that there is such another thing as necessity—the recognition of the fact that there is an “I can” and an “I cannot,” an “I may” and an “I must.”
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler
Lord, What is Man?
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler
Lord, What is Man?
We have got into life by stealth and petitio principii, by the free use of that contradiction in terms which we declare to be the most outrageous violation of our reason. We have wriggled into it by holding that everything is both one and many, both infinite in time and space and yet finite, both like and unlike to the same thing, both itself and not itself, both free and yet inexorably fettered, both every adjective in the dictionary and at the same time the flat contradiction of every one of them.
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler
Lord, What is Man?