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
I am the enfant terrible of literature and science
Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or anything else, is always a portrait of himself, and the more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly will his character appear in spite of him.
An empty house is like a stray dog or a body from which life has departed.
Rare virtues are like rare plants or animals, things that have not been able to hold their own in the world. A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner but more durable metal.
The thief. Once committed beyond a certain point he should not worry himself too much about not being a thief any more. Thieving is God's message to him. Let him try and be a good thief.
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.
He ne'er considered it, as loath To look a gift-horse in the mouth
Then spare the rod and spoil the child.
Eating is touch carried to the bitter end.
Such as take lodgings in a head that's to be let unfurnished.
Silence is not always tact, but it is tact that is golden, not silence.
For things said false and never meant, Do oft prove true by accident
Everyone should keep a mental wastepaper basket, and the older he grows, the more things will he promptly consign to it.
It has been said that though God cannot alter the past, historians can; it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence