Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Butler

Butler smuggles a moral theory into a joke, then dares you to laugh at yourself before you can judge anyone else. The engine here is “absurdities”: not grand villainy, but the small self-mythologies people use to justify pettiness, cruelty, vanity. A humor “keen enough” is basically a scalpel. It cuts through self-deception, and once you can see yourself clearly, sin becomes harder to pull off because the performance collapses. Most wrongdoing depends on a story you tell yourself: I’m the exception, I’m the victim, I’m the hero. Humor punctures that narration by making it look ridiculous.

The subtext is aggressively Victorian and quietly rebellious. Butler grew up under the shadow of earnest moral certainty (and a clerical father), and his work often treats piety as a social technology: it polices, it flatters, it conceals. Here, he offers comedy as an antidote to sanctimony. It’s not that laughter makes you “good”; it makes you less available to your own hypocrisy. That’s a sharper claim, and more plausible.

Then he twists the knife with “save those worth committing.” It’s a wink at the reader and a critique of puritanical cataloging of vice. Butler implies that some transgressions are tied to vitality, desire, maybe even honesty. The line refuses moral absolutism while still defending a kind of ethics: the best restraint isn’t fear of punishment, but the humiliating clarity of self-recognition. In Butler’s world, the truly dangerous sin isn’t appetite; it’s taking yourself seriously enough to rationalize anything.