Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Butler

Butler’s line lands like a compliment that curdles into an accusation. “Priests are not men of the world” sounds, on first pass, like a sober defense of spiritual specialization: the clergy should stand apart from commerce, ambition, and ordinary appetites. Then he twists the knife with “it is not intended that they should be,” exposing that separation as design, not destiny. The priest’s distance from lived reality isn’t an unfortunate side effect; it’s institutional strategy.

The killer move is the punchline: “a University training is the one best adapted to prevent their becoming so.” Butler isn’t praising higher education; he’s indicting a particular kind of education as a social technology that manufactures detachment. “University” here isn’t the romantic ideal of learning. It’s a grooming mechanism that swaps experience for credentialed discourse, producing men trained to speak authoritatively about life while being carefully insulated from it. The subtext: a priest who truly becomes “of the world” might start asking the wrong questions - about power, money, suffering, sex, hypocrisy - and lose the useful ignorance that props up moral authority.

Context matters: Butler, a Victorian skeptic with a satirist’s allergy to pious certainty, spent years sparring with Anglican respectability and the intellectual machinery that defended it. His irony targets the alliance between church and elite education: universities that look like engines of enlightenment but function, in this case, as factories for compliant interpreters of doctrine. The line works because it weaponizes bureaucratic understatement. “Best adapted” sounds like a committee report, which makes the implied conspiracy feel colder, and therefore more believable.