Human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning.

—Samuel Butler

About Samuel Butler

Portrait of Samuel Butler

Samuel Butler (4 December 1835 – 18 June 1902) was an English novelist and critic, best known for the satirical utopian novel Erewhon (1872) and the semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh (published posthumously in 1903 with substantial revisions and published in its original form in 1964 as Ernest...

More quotations from Samuel Butler

Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.

—Samuel Butler

A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.

—Samuel Butler

reproduction eggs

The history of art is the history of revivals.

—Samuel Butler

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Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

—Samuel Butler

It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.

—Samuel Butler

More quotations tagged with “life”

You can go through life and make new friends every year—every month practically—but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years.

—Alexander McCall Smith in The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

life friendship friends childhood

Wasn't marriage, like life, unstimulating and unprofitable and somewhat empty when too well-ordered and protected and guarded. Wasn't it finer, more splendid, more nourishing when it was, like life itself, a mixture of the sordid and the magnificent; of mud and stars; of earth and flowers; of love and hate and laughter and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt.

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My feeling is that there is nothing in life but refraining from hurting others, and comforting those who are sad.

—Olive Schreiner

empathy life purpose sadness comfort do no harm

So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good.

—Helen Keller

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We have two lives—the one we learn with and the life we live after that.

—Bernard Malamud

life learning change

History

23 Jun 2015 Added