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
The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.
There is such a thing as doing good that evil may come.
Those who have never had a father can at any rate never know the sweets of losing one. To most men the death of his father is a new lease of life.
What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, I bet that my Redeemer liveth.
People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable.
Money is the last enemy that shall never be subdued. While there is flesh there is money or the want of money, but money is always on the brain so long as there is a brain in reasonable order.
Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbours, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them.
Christ: I dislike him very much. Still, I can stand him. What I cannot stand is the wretched band of people whose profession is to hoodwink us about him.
A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those worth committing.
The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.
Nobody shoots at Santa Claus.
Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.
If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.
In old times people used to try and square the circle; now they try and devise schemes for satisfying the Irish nation.