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
When the righteous man truth away from his righteousness that he hath committed and doeth that which is neither quite lawful nor quite right, he will generally be found to have gained in amiability what he has lost in holiness.
It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.
In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.
Still amorous, and fond, and billing, / Like Philip and Mary on a shilling.
Compound for sins they are inclined to by damning those they have no mind to.
Gold is the soul of all civil life, that can resolve all things into itself, and turn itself into all things
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.
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.
Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself
Besides 'tis known he could speak Greek, As naturally as pigs squeak
Science, after all, is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance.
The clergyman is expected to be a kind of human Sunday.
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.
Stowed away in a Montreal lumber room / The Discobolus standeth and turneth his face to the wall; / Dusty, cobweb-covered, maimed and set at naught, / Beauty crieth in an attic and no man regardeth: / O God! O Montreal!