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
One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once.
A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner, but more durable alloy.
Virtue knows that it is impossible to get on without compromise, and tunes herself, as it were, a trifle sharp to allow for an inevitable fall in playing.
Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.
Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.
Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds
To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.
The healthy stomach is nothing if it is not conservative. Few radicals have good digestions.
Men should not try to overstrain their goodness more than any other faculty, bodily or mental.
People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.
Priests are not men of the world; it is not intended that they should be; and a University training is the one best adapted to prevent their becoming so.
Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch a cold on overexposure.
Let every man be true and every god a liar.
A physician's physiology has much the same relation to his power of healing as a cleric's divinity has to his power of influencing conduct.