"Worth Doing"

"If I deserve to be remembered, it will be not
so much for anything I have written or for any
new way of looking at old facts which I may
have suggested, as for having shown that a
man of no special ability, with no literary
connections, not particularly laborious,
fairly, but not supremely accurate as far as
he goes, and not travelling far either for his
facts or from them, may yet, by being
perfectly square, sticking to his point. not
letting his temper run away with him, and
biding his time, be a match for the most
powerful literary and scientific coterie that
England has ever known.

I hope it may be said of me that I discomfited
an unscrupulous, self-seeking clique, and set
a more hopeful example myself. To have done
this is the best of all discoveries."

The Notebooks of Samuel Butler (1835 -1912)
selections arranged by Henry
Festing Jones
Dutton, 1917