Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Butler

Butler flips the Victorian sermon on its head: work, not laziness, can be the real moral trap. The sting is in “besetting sin,” a phrase steeped in Christian self-surveillance, usually reserved for lust, drink, vanity. He drags industriousness into that same confessional category and, with one sly pivot, turns the era’s favorite virtue into a vice.

The specific intent isn’t to sneer at labor itself but at the kind of work that becomes complicity. “With some men” is doing surgical work: Butler isn’t indicting effort in the abstract; he’s warning that certain bosses, institutions, and “serious” projects recruit your time the way temptation recruits your conscience. You can be busy and still be spiritually idle, because your agency has been outsourced. The line reads like a field guide to self-respect: sometimes the hardest thing is not to work harder, but to refuse the wrong work.

The subtext is social, even classed. In late-19th century England, moralizing about idleness was a tool of discipline, aimed downward as much as inward. Butler, an iconoclast who distrusted pieties (religious, social, professional), reframes the debate: relentless productivity can be a way to dodge responsibility, curiosity, and dissent. It’s a neat indictment of “good men” doing bad systems’ paperwork.

Context matters: Butler lived in a culture that sanctified duty and “usefulness.” His line punctures that sanctimony with wit and suspicion, insisting that virtue isn’t measured by exertion but by judgment.