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
Compound for sins they are inclined to by damning those they have no mind to.
To me it seems that youth is like spring, an over-praised season delightful if it happens to be a favored one, but in practice very rarely favored and more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting east winds than genial breezes
To swallow gudgeons ere they're catched, And count their chickens ere they're hatched
The world will only, in the end, follow those who have despised as well as served it.
The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
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!
That vice pays homage to virtue is notorious; we call it hypocrisy
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
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
The thief. Once committed beyond a certain point he should not worry himself too much about not being a thief any more. Thieving is God's message to him. Let him try and be a good thief.
Science, after all, is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance.
Quoth Hudibras, I smell a rat; Ralpho, thou dost prevaricate