R.E. Butler Quotes

Photography has a relation to intervention, but photographing is not the same as an intervening.

True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self.

I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you.

That which could hunger, could starve.

Poet and sculptor, do the work, / Nor let the modish painter shirk

One had a lovely face, And two or three had charm, But charm and face were in vain. Because the mountain grass Cannot keep the form Where the mountain hare has lain.

The seven deadly sins: Want of money, bad health, bad temper, chastity, family ties, knowing that you know things, and believing in the Christian religion.

Happiness or satisfaction consists only in the enjoyment of those objects which are by nature suited to our several particular appetites, passions, and affections.

A man, if he be active and energetic, can hardly fail also, be he never so selfish, of benefiting the general public interest.

It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country...but the profits...skyrocket.

All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.

Personality is born out of pain. It is the fire shut up in the flint.

Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbours, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them.

I spent many years not knowing where my dad was... Not knowing if my dad was alive, even. He turned up when I was 16 out of the blue.

I'm looking for the face I had, before the world was made.

only an aching heart Conceives a changeless work of art.

Modern mathematics, that most astounding of intellectual creations, has projected the mind's eye through infinite time and the mind's hand into boundless space.

Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

No man has ever lived that had enough of children's gratitude or woman's love.

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.

Ecstasy is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen perhaps, by all those that still live.

I have a level of fear going into every project, and that's what keeps me going.

Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.

Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something.

The pain others give passes away in their later kindness, but that of our own blunders, especially when they hurt our vanity, never passes away

Cherish yesterday. dream tomorrow, live like crazy today!!

I think I get laid less now than I used to, because I’m way more paranoid now.

To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.

Might the peasant expect the Almighty to stay the thunder storm, which clears the air of a nation from pestilence, lest the lightning bold should in its flash kill his cow?

Life is getting better, but that won't stop a war if politicians and business people decide it's to their advantage to have one.

Toward the later days of Sabbath, instead of going in and knocking out what songs we did in rehearsal, we would polish them to death.

[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.

If suffering brings wisdom, I would wish to be less wise.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

There are many things that go to make up an education, but there are just two things without which no man can ever hope to have an education and these two things are character and good manners.

The Americans never walk. In winter too cold and in summer too hot.

It is tact that is golden, not silence.

I think we have to accept a wide variety of positions on gender. Some want to be gender-free, but others want to be free really to be a gender that is crucial to who they are.

The destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.

The mystical life is at the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.

Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all my ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

All art is in the last analysis an endeavor to condense as out of the flying vapor of the world an image of human perfection, and for its own and not for the art's sake.

Black Sabbath was written on bass: I just walked into the studio and went, bah, bah, bah, and everybody joined in and we just did it.

Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it.

Time was invented by the Almighty God in order to give ideas a chance.

I have found nothing half so good / As my long-planned half solitude, / Where I can sit up half the night / With some friend that has the wit.

In politics you must always keep running with the pack. The moment that you falter and they sense that you are injured, the rest will turn on you like wolves.