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
In practice it is seldom very hard to do one's duty when one knows what it is, but it is sometimes extremely difficult to find this out.
Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.
All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it - and they do enjoy it as much as man and other circumstances will allow.
He that complies against his will, Is of his own opinion still.
Spare the rod and spoil the child.
Neither have they hearts to stay, nor wit enough to run away.
I fall asleep in the full and certain hope That my slumber shall not be broken; And that, though I be all-forgetting, Yet shall I not be all-forgotten, But continue that life in the thoughts and deeds of those I have loved.
The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.
Cat-Ideas and Mouse-Ideas. We can never get rid of mouse-ideas completely, they keep turning up again and again, and nibble, nibble-no matter how often we drive them off. The best way to keep them down is to have a few good strong cat-ideas which will embrace them and ensure their not reappearing till they do so in another shape.
A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.
They say the test of [literary power] is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, "Can he name a kitten?" And by this test I am condemned, for I cannot.
We all love best not those who offend us least, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.
Men of Science. If they are worthy of the name they are indeed about God's path and about his bed and spying out all his ways.
If [science] tends to thicken the crust of ice on which, as it were, we are skating, it is all right. If it tries to find, or professes to have found, the solid ground at the bottom of the water it is all wrong. Our business is with the thickening of this crust by extending our knowledge downward from above, as ice gets thicker while the frost lasts; we should not try to freeze upwards from the bottom.