Life's Pleasures Quote by Samuel Butler

Pleasure, Butler suggests, is best practiced with death kept at arm's length: not denied, not fetishized, just quietly filed away while the wine is poured. The line rides a tightrope between stoic counsel and sly impatience with people who make a hobby out of mortality. "Neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it" is balanced to the point of parody, a deliberately fussy moderation that hints he doesn't trust grand emotional postures in either direction. He's skewering two Victorian tics at once: the moral panic that demands constant seriousness, and the melodramatic wallowing that turns doom into a personality.

Then he slips in the heavy machinery: "The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy". It's a citation with a shrug attached. The "etc". is the tell - a satirist's eye-roll compressed into three letters. Butler invokes the Calvinist-flavored logic of arbitrary grace, then refuses to dignify it with reverent attention. If salvation hinges on divine whim, obsessing over the ledger is less spiritual discipline than anxious superstition. "The less we think about it the better" is both coping strategy and critique: when theology becomes a roulette wheel, the healthiest response may be to stop staring at it.

Context matters: Butler made a career out of needling inherited certainties - religious, social, even scientific - and this reads like a domestic philosophy for life under ideological overcast. Eat, drink, acknowledge the grave without letting it run your calendar. If the cosmos won't explain itself, at least don't let it ruin dinner.