Faith & Spirit Quote by Samuel Butler

Butler slips a sugar-coated pill into Victorian tea: if the point of life is enjoyment, the moral accountants have already lost. The first line is disarmingly aphoristic, almost Protestant in its plainness, but it quietly detonates the era's obsession with self-denial as virtue. "Spent his life best" turns living into a ledger, then immediately rigs the audit in favor of pleasure. Not duty. Not reputation. Not productive suffering. Enjoyment becomes the metric that makes every respectable sacrifice look suspiciously like bad bookkeeping.

Then comes the sly second line, where Butler performs a ventriloquism act with religious language. "God will take care" sounds like piety, but the subtext is darker and funnier: life already contains built-in limits. You will not be allowed to overindulge for long because the world, your body, bad luck, and time will intervene. It's a cosmic version of, "Don't worry, the system is designed to curb excess". The theology is less about a caring deity than about inevitability, and the comfort it offers is edged with fatalism.

Context matters: Butler wrote against the grain of earnest Victorian moralism, suspicious of institutions that claimed to know what was "good for us". Here, he grants the moralists their favorite word ("good") only to relocate the policing function from society to circumstance. It's a permission slip that also reads like a warning: enjoy what you can, because the ceiling is real and it isn't negotiable.