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
God cannot alter the past, though historians can.
To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.
Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.
The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.
Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.
Opinions have vested interests just as men have.
The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.
There is no bore like a clever bore.
Letters are like wine; if they are sound they ripen with keeping. A man should lay down letters as he does a cellar of wine.
A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.
In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa.
In old times people used to try and square the circle; now they try and devise schemes for satisfying the Irish nation.