Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Butler

Butler’s line has the clean snap of a proverb, but it’s doing something sharper than generic memento mori. By pairing “morning dew” with “a flash of lightning,” he compresses two kinds of vanishing into one unsettling image: the slow disappearance you barely notice and the sudden erasure you can’t process. Dew evaporates quietly, almost politely. Lightning is spectacle and violence. Life, Butler implies, is vulnerable to both: time’s casual attrition and fate’s abrupt interruption. That double register is the subtext that makes the metaphor bite.

The sentence also shows a poet’s suspicion of human self-importance. “Human life” is not framed as a heroic arc or moral quest; it’s reduced to atmospheric phenomena, beautiful but indifferent. Dew and lightning don’t have narratives. They happen, they pass, and the world doesn’t pause to commemorate them. The effect is a cool realism dressed in lyricism: the line comforts you with imagery even as it refuses to console.

Context matters. Butler wrote in a 19th-century Britain where progress and confidence coexisted with brutal reminders of fragility: disease, industrial accidents, imperial wars, and a rising scientific worldview that made human exceptionalism harder to defend. In that climate, the metaphor functions as a quiet corrective to Victorian certainty. Not despair, exactly - more an invitation to humility, urgency, and a clear-eyed sense that permanence is the story we tell ourselves, not the deal we’re actually getting.