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 life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.
When you've told someone that you've left them a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.
To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.
Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.
There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.
The dead should be judged like criminals, impartially, but they should be allowed the benefit of the doubt.
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.
It is death, and not what comes after death, that men are generally afraid of.
To die completely, a person must not only forget but be forgotten, and he who is not forgotten is not dead.
If a man knows not life which he hath seen, how shall he know death, which he hath not seen?
Our own death is a premium which we must pay for the far greater benefit we have derived from the fact that so many people have not only lived but also died before us.
The world will only, in the end, follow those who have despised as well as served it.
Science, after all, is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance.
Quoth Hudibras, I smell a rat; Ralpho, thou dost prevaricate