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
Christ and The Church: If he were to apply for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty, adultery and desertion, he would probably get one.
To live is like to love - all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.
Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.
Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.
Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.
Though wisdom cannot be gotten for gold, still less can be gotten without it.
A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog; but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide.
That vice pays homage to virtue is notorious; we call it hypocrisy
A lawyer's dream of Heaven: Every man reclaimed his own property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.
Young as he was, his instinct told him that the best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way - who husbands it too carefully to waste it where it can be dispensed with
An empty house is like a stray dog or a body from which life has departed.
An idea must not be condemned for being a little shy and incoherent; all new ideas are shy when introduced first among our old ones. We should have patience and see whether the incoherency is likely to wear off or to wear on, in which latter case the
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!