Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Butler

Butler treats virtue less like a halo and more like a hamstring: pull it too hard and it tears. The line’s quiet provocation is in its demotion of “goodness” from sacred exception to ordinary human capacity, one faculty among others, subject to fatigue, vanity, and misuse. He’s warning against moral athletics, the Victorian impulse to turn righteousness into an endurance sport and then call the pain proof of purity.

The intent is not to sneer at goodness but to puncture the self-congratulatory style of it. “Overstrain” implies both effort and injury, hinting that excessive moral effort can warp into performance, martyrdom, or cruelty in disguise. Butler’s subtext is psychological: people who try to be relentlessly good often become brittle, resentful, or quietly domineering, demanding the same strain from everyone else. When morality becomes maximalist, it stops being a guide and turns into a weapon.

Context matters: Butler wrote in a culture thick with moral earnestness, religious duty, and public respectability. As a satirical, skeptical voice (best known for skewering piety and hypocrisy), he’s suspicious of virtue that advertises itself. By pairing goodness with “bodily or mental” faculties, he also nods to balance: just as you wouldn’t train a single muscle to exhaustion while neglecting the rest, you shouldn’t contort your life around an impossible moral ideal. The line works because it reframes ethics as sustainable practice, not ecstatic self-erasure, and because it suggests a heresy the era needed to hear: moderation isn’t a moral failure; it’s often the only way morality survives contact with real life.