R.E. Butler Quotes

What I miss [about church] is being forced to be in community with people that aren't the same as me.

Most of us cherish freedom, but when we actually get the opportunity to make our own way it can be terrifying.

Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.

If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.

The forty-four-hour week has no charm for me. I'm looking for a forty-hour day.

I like to deal in the reality of life. I'm too old to sing about women and things like that.

Theres a great sense of achievement, testosterone, fun, being able to live out your masculinity when you play an action role or an action-adventure or a real tough-guy role.

[How to train your dragon] is beautiful to look at and, again, those values that it contains about relationships, friendships, and bonding in the face of ignorance.

I went from somebody who didn't sing to somebody who didn't speak.

Goodness often blossoms like roses on very rickety trellis-work, and beauty can grow out of nonsense.

Every thing is what it is, and not another thing.

Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.

There is nothing better than the encouragement of a good old friend.

The fifth freedom, the Freedom of Individual Enterprise, is the keystone of the arch on which the other Four Freedoms rest. This is what freedom means.

The big talent is persistence.

...I can write my own stories and I can write myself in.

I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.

Religion is a dangerous prod, because it can always be misused and get out of hand, but it's useful for keeping people on the straight and narrow.

Man is God's highest present development. He is the latest thing in God.

There is such a thing as doing good that evil may come.

Man, unlike the animals, has never learned that the sole purpose of life is to enjoy it.

An obstinate man does not hold opinions, but they hold him; for when he is once possessed with an error, it is, like a devil, only cast out with great difficulty.

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.

All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it - and they do enjoy it as much as man and other circumstances will allow.

Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.

The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable, and absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is.

Trust your intuition, rather than technology, to protect you from violence.

The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards.

All dreams of the soul End in a beautiful man's or woman's body.

The only enemy of innocence and beauty is time.

Teaching is not filling up a pail, it is lighting a fire.

It seems to me that love, if it is fine, is essentially a discipline.

When two close kindred meet What better than call a dance?.

It is love that I am seeking for, But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind That is not in the world.

Though leaves are many, the root is one; Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun Now I may wither into the truth.

When a man grows old his joy Grows more deep day after day, His empty heart is full at length But he has need of all that strength Because of the increasing Night That opens her mystery and fright.

I thought no more was needed Youth to prolong Than dumb-bell and foil To keep the body young. O who could have foretold That the heart grows old?

Is it not certain that the Creator yawns in earthquake and thunder and other popular displays, but toils in rounding the delicate spiral of a shell? -Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil

What can be shown? What true love be? All could be known or shown If Time were but gone.

"Chaunt in his ear delusions magical, That he may fight the horses of the sea." The Druids took them to their mystery, And chaunted for three days.

What shall I do for pretty girls Now my old bawd is dead?

Mock mockers after that That would not lift a hand maybe To help good, wise or great To bar that foul storm out, for we Traffic in mockery.

I have drunk ale from the Country of the Young / And weep because I know all things now.

Evil comes to us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.

But stories that live longest Are sung above the glass, And Parnell loved his country And Parnell loved his lass.

God spreads the heavens above us like great wings, And gives a little round of deeds and days.

now I bring full-flavoured wine out of a barrel found Where seven Ephesian topers slept and never knew When Alexander's empire passed, they slept so sound.

... Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild.

I want a baby of my very own one day, but it seems that my being male is a BIIIIT of a problem.

I'm no great fan of the phallus, and have made my own views known on this subject before, so I do not propose a return to a notion of the phallus as the third term in any and all relations of desire.