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
If old Pontifex had had Cromwell's chances he would have done all that Cromwell did, and have done it better; if he had had Giotto's chances he would have done all that Giotto did, and done it no worse; as it was, he was a village carpenter, and I wi
Nothing is well done nor worth doing unless, take it all round, it has come pretty easily
Happiness and misery depend not on how high up or low down you are - they depend not upon these, but on the direction in which you are tending
Genius is a nuisance, and it is the duty of schools and colleges to abate it by setting genius-traps in its way.
In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.
The clergyman is expected to be a kind of human Sunday.
A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.
And like a lobster boiled, the morn From black to red began to turn
All of the animals except for man know that the principle business of life is to enjoy it.
There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.
It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.
We shall never get people whose time is money to take much interest in atoms.
It is not sufficiently considered in the hour of exultation, that all human excellence is comparative; that no man performs much but in proportion to what other accomplish, or to the time and opportunities which have been allowed him.
Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another. To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to forget and to forget is to die.