“We want words to do more than they can. We try to do with them what comes to very much like trying to mend a watch with a pickaxe or to paint a miniature with a mop; we expect them to help us to grip and dissect that which in ultimate essence is as ungrippable as shadow. Nevertheless there they are; we have got to live with them, and the wise course is to treat them as we do our neighbours, and make the best and not the worst of them.”

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About Samuel Butler

English novelist and critic

Samuel Butler was an English novelist and critic. He is best known for the satirical utopian novel Erewhon (1872) and for The Way of All Flesh, a semi-autobiographical novel that has stayed in print since publication. Butler also wrote on Christian orthodoxy, evolutionary thought, and Italian art. He made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, which are still consulted today.

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Books by Samuel Butler

Erewhon

1981

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Erewhon Revisited

1910

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The way of all flesh

2007

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Erewhon / Erewhon revisited

1932

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