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 oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
People are lucky and unlucky...according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.
Gold is the soul of all civil life, that can resolve all things into itself, and turn itself into all things
For things said false and never meant, Do oft prove true by accident
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.
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.
God cannot alter the past, that is why he is obliged to connive at the existence of historians.
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.
He ne'er considered it, as loath To look a gift-horse in the mouth
Such as take lodgings in a head that's to be let unfurnished.
Some men love truth so much that they seem in continual fear lest she should catch cold on over-exposure.
It has been said that though God cannot alter the past, historians can; it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence
I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.
I'll make the fur / Fly round the ears of the old cur.