Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Butler

Butler’s line is a pinprick aimed at a whole Victorian moral economy: the public habit of praising “humility” as if it were a stable character trait rather than a social position. The wit is in the gentle feint - “I really do not see much use” - which reads like mild practicality while smuggling in a harsher claim: elevating the meek is often less virtue than theater, and the trait being rewarded can’t survive the reward.

The sentence turns on a sly paradox. “Exalting” is a religious-sounding verb, the language of sermons and sainthood, but Butler uses it like an administrative action: promote, platform, canonize. Once exalted, the humble and meek “do not remain” so; the phrase implies not moral failure so much as the predictable physics of attention. Status changes behavior because it changes incentives. Humility functions, in part, as a strategy for the powerless; give someone power and you’ve altered the conditions that made that strategy rational.

Subtext: Butler is suspicious of moral branding. Societies like to celebrate the “deserving poor,” the modest genius, the unassuming public servant - figures whose meekness reassures elites that recognition won’t threaten the hierarchy. When the newly exalted stop performing modesty, observers feel betrayed, but Butler suggests the betrayal is built into the transaction. We’re not rewarding humility; we’re rewarding the appearance of it, then acting shocked when the costume no longer fits.

In a culture saturated with piety and propriety, the barb lands cleanly: the problem isn’t that people change, it’s that we demand they don’t - so our praise can stay flattering to us.