Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Butler

Self-praise, Butler suggests, isn’t just vanity; it’s strategy. The line plays like a genteel confession delivered with a straight face: if you’re going to be flattered, why outsource the job to people who might miss the mark? The joke is in the phrasing. “Advantage” gives the maneuver a cool, practical sheen, as if we’re discussing a clever household economy rather than a moral lapse. Then comes the deliciously physical metaphor: praise “laid on so thick” like icing, not earned but applied. The final twist - “exactly in the right places” - turns self-celebration into tailoring. You know your own weak spots, your own preferred myths, your own résumé’s flattering angles.

Butler writes from a Victorian world obsessed with respectability, where modesty was a social currency and reputation a form of capital. In that setting, self-advertisement had to be smuggled in, disguised as humility or necessity. His sentence punctures that performance. It implies that public praise is often a collaboration, a negotiated fiction; the only difference with self-praise is that the negotiation disappears and the fiction becomes more efficient.

The subtext is darker than the wit. If praise can be “placed” correctly, then it’s less about truth than about effect - a reminder that acclaim is frequently a kind of design. Butler’s irony doesn’t just mock ego; it exposes the mechanics of how egos get publicly constructed.