Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Butler

Moral purity is a fast track to moral cruelty. Butler’s line turns Victorian self-improvement inside out, catching the era’s favorite posture - virtue as a polished social identity - and showing the snarl underneath. The phrasing is deliberately simple, almost proverb-like, which lets the reversal land like a trap: you walk in expecting instruction and exit indicted.

The intent isn’t to dunk on ethics; it’s to mock the performance of ethics. In Butler’s England, “virtue” often meant obedience to a tight code: sexual restraint, industriousness, piety, respectability. Those who mastered the code could treat it like a club. The subtext is that virtue, when worn as a badge, breeds vices with good manners: sanctimony, priggishness, punitive judgment, the bureaucratic pleasure of correcting other people. “Be virtuous” sounds like self-discipline; “and you will be vicious” exposes how quickly self-discipline becomes discipline of others.

Butler, a poet-novelist and skeptic who sparred with religious certainty and social hypocrisy, liked to show how systems that claim moral authority also manufacture cruelty. The quote works because it collapses the distance between the saint and the scold: the same impulse that wants to be “good” also wants to be seen as good, and being seen as good tempts you to identify villains. Once you’ve found villains, vice can masquerade as duty.

It’s not relativism; it’s a warning about moral absolutism’s emotional payoff. Virtue becomes vicious when it stops being a practice and starts being a weapon.