Science & Tech Quote by Samuel Butler

Butler’s line is a quiet provocation dressed as common sense: it demotes the era’s new god, “science,” without rejecting it outright. Written in the long afterglow of Darwin and the Industrial Revolution, it carries the impatience of a Victorian mind watching measurement and machinery colonize every corner of life - morality, education, even faith - and asking what gets flattened in the process. “Exact science” implies repeatability, stable laws, clean prediction. Butler’s point is that living refuses that contract.

The phrase works because it’s not airy romanticism; it’s a strategic reframe. By calling life “an art,” Butler smuggles in a different standard of truth: not falsifiable certainty, but judgment under pressure. Art is about composition, timing, improvisation, taste - choices that can be more or less wise without ever being provable. That’s the subtext: you can’t outsource meaning to a method. You have to cultivate sensibility.

There’s also a sly critique of moral bookkeeping. Victorian culture loved rules and categories; Butler, who skewered hypocrisy in his novels and essays, preferred the messier reality that people revise themselves mid-sentence. The line gives permission to be unfinished, to treat identity and ethics as works-in-progress rather than solved equations.

It lands today because it refuses both technocratic arrogance and anti-intellectual shrugging. Science can tell you how things work; Butler reminds you that living is still a craft - and craftsmanship demands responsibility, not just data.