Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Butler

A Victorian poet stitching two blunt proverbs together is doing more than offering grandma-grade advice; Samuel Butler is weaponizing common sense against the era's most fashionable delusions. "Look before you leap" carries the tidy logic of prudence, the middle-class moral of self-management. "As you sow, ye are like to reap" drags in biblical cadence and agricultural inevitability, giving the warning a sense of cosmic bookkeeping. Fused, the line stops being about a single impulsive mistake and becomes an argument about causality: choices are not private, and consequences are not negotiable.

The intent is prophylactic. Butler isn't romanticizing risk; he's trying to puncture the glamor of the leap itself. The subtext is a critique of the self-excusing mindset that treats intention as a substitute for outcome. You can hear the implied rebuttal to the common Victorian dodge: I meant well. Fine. What did you plant? The phrasing "ye are like to reap" is especially sly: "like to" introduces probability rather than divine certainty, a wink at moral formulas that pretend life is perfectly fair while still insisting patterns exist.

Context matters because Butler lived in a culture obsessed with moral progress and social respectability, yet roiled by industrialization, empire, and religious doubt. He borrows scripture's authority without fully submitting to it, sounding pious enough to pass and skeptical enough to sting. The line works because it flatters the listener as rational and responsible, then corners them with a simple, brutal premise: outcomes have memory.