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
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.
All truth is not to be told at all times.
Our ideas are for the most part like bad sixpences, and we spend our lives trying to pass them on one another.
Silence and tact may or may not be the same thing.
A skilful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war.
To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all.
From a worldly point of view, there is no mistake so great as that of being always right.
God as now generally conceived of is only the last witch.
When you have told anyone you have left him a legacy, the only decent thing to do is die at once.
The want of money is the root of all evil.
Though wisdom cannot be gotten for gold, still less can be gotten without it.
Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.
A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.