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 man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.
Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.
Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
Evil is like water, it abounds, is cheap, soon fouls, but runs itself clear of taint.
If people would dare to speak to one another unreservedly, there would be a good deal less sorrow in the world a hundred years hence.
The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.
When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.
Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better.
There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.
Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.
Human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning.
Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.
People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.