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
We all like to forgive, and love best not those who offend us least, nor who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.
The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.
There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire absence of thought.
Women can stand a beating except when it is with their own weapons.
Theist and atheist: the fight between them is as to whether God shall be called God or shall have some other name.
There is no such source of error as the pursuit of truth.
The seven deadly sins: Want of money, bad health, bad temper, chastity, family ties, knowing that you know things, and believing in the Christian religion.
To know God better is only to realize how impossible it is that we should ever know him at all. I know not which is more childish to deny him, or define him.
Mr. Tennyson has said that more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of, but he wisely refrains from saying whether they are good or bad things.
If I die prematurely I shall be saved from being bored to death at my own success.
A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage - but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.
And so there is no God but has been in the loins of past gods.
Be virtuous and you will be vicious.
Don't learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world.