Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Butler

Moral certainty has a way of curdling into its opposite, and Butler needles that smugness with a line that flips like a coin: “In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa.” It’s epigram as booby trap. The phrasing refuses a clean border between the “good people” and the “bad people,” suggesting that ethics isn’t a walled city but a crowded street where impulses mingle and motives cross-dress.

Butler’s intent is less to pardon wrongdoing than to puncture the Victorian habit of branding character as a fixed essence. In a culture that prized respectability as proof of righteousness, he’s pointing out the psychological loophole: virtue often contains the seed of vice (pride, cruelty in the name of discipline, moral vanity), while vice can smuggle in virtue (honesty from a scoundrel, solidarity among the outcasts, a frank appetite that’s less hypocritical than “proper” restraint). The line’s chiasmus - virtue/vice, vice/virtue - is doing the argument’s work: it forces the reader to experience the reversal, not just agree with it.

The subtext is a warning about self-deception. When we’re sure we’re virtuous, we’re most likely to stop examining ourselves; when we’re labeled vicious, we may see through polite fictions and act with an unvarnished clarity. Butler, the skeptic of pieties in works like Erewhon, is diagnosing morality as a social performance as much as a private compass. The sting is democratic: no one gets to stand outside the mess and judge it cleanly.