Samuel Butler
Samuel Butler
Samuel Butlerwas an iconoclastic Victorian-era English author who published a variety of works. Two of his most famous pieces are the Utopian satire Erewhon and a semi-autobiographical novel published posthumously, The Way of All Flesh. He is also known for examining Christian orthodoxy, substantive studies of evolutionary thought, studies of Italian art, and works of literary history and criticism. Butler made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, which remain in use to this day...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth4 December 1835
Have always been at daggers-drawing, / And one another clapper-clawing.
Gold is the soul of all civil life, that can resolve all things into itself, and turn itself into all things
Because they did not see merit where they should have seen it, people, to express their regret, will go and leave a lot of money to the very people who will be the first to throw stones at the next person who has anything to say and finds a difficulty in getting a hearing.
I believe that more unhappiness comes from this source than from any other--I mean from the attempt to prolong family connections unduly and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so
I am the enfant terrible of literature and science
He ne'er considered it, as loath To look a gift-horse in the mouth
For things said false and never meant, Do oft prove true by accident
He could distinguish, and divide / A hair 'twixt south and south-west side. / On either which he would dispute, / Confute, change hands, and still confute.
Vaccination is the medical sacrament corresponding to baptism.
Such as take lodgings in a head that's to be let unfurnished.
Some men love truth so much that they seem in continual fear lest she should catch cold on over-exposure.
The advantage of doing one's praising to oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places
People are lucky and unlucky...according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.
For most men, and most circumstances, pleasure /tangible material prosperity in this world /is the safest test of virtue. Progress has ever been through the pleasures rather than through the extreme sharp virtues, and the most virtuous have leaned to excess rather than to asceticism.