R.E. Butler Quotes

Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime

One should not lose one's temper unless one is certain of getting more and more angry to the end.

I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Come away, O human child: To the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, I bet that my Redeemer liveth.

Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.

You only trust those who are absolutely like yourself, those who have signed a pledge of allegiance to this particular identity.

America is the best half-educated country in the world.

I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all like an opera.

Peace is a certain resistance to the terrible satisfactions of war.

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.

I must say, I feel the reception of my work is none of my business.

There is no original or primary gender a drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original.

What we need are poems that interrogate the world of pronouns, open up possibilities of language and life; forms of politics that support and encourage self-affirmation.

Opinions have vested interests just as men have.

I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic.

Be virtuous and you will be vicious.

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

I really do not see much use in exalting the humble and meek; they do not remain humble and meek long when they are exalted.

If people would dare to speak to one another unreservedly, there would be a good deal less sorrow in the world a hundred years hence.

Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.

Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds

In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa.

Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.

Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost.

It seems to me that responsiveness is a better source for understanding what moral claims are and how they work upon us.

One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once.

Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.

A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.

The Bishop has a skin, God knows, Wrinkled like the foot of a goose, (All find safety in the tomb.) Nor can he hide in holy black The heron's hunch upon his back, But a birch-tree stood my Jack.

The ironic humor comes from the distance between what we understand about ourselves and what is truly going on in ourselves.

I think the Priem Minister has to be a butcher and know the joints.

Test every work of intellect or faith and everything that your own hands have wrought.

Perhaps we have to remember that there are forms of outrage that do not lead to any sort of mobilization, and there are ways of "registering the facts" that do not lead to outrage.

I love to do films of all shapes and sizes and feelings and genres. So for me to go from Tomb Raider straight into Dear Frankie, there's nothing that excites me more than to keep mixing it up.

...The war (WWI) cost your Uncle Sam $52 billion. $39 billion was expended in the actual war period. This expenditure yielded $16 billion in profits.

My junior high was dreadful. I see a lot of my fellow alumni on America's Most Wanted.

The truth is never pretty.

I believe... that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

Talent perceives differences; genius, unity.

Earth in beauty dressed Awaits returning spring. All true love must die, Alter at the best Into some lesser thing. Prove that I lie.

I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.

I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic's heart.

The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method

I love English girls! I adore all their different accents. Who knows, I could find a British girlfriend on my travels!

Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn, Come clear of the nets of wrong and right; Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight, Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

What if the Church and the State Are the mob that howls at the door! Wine shall run thick to the end, Bread taste sour.

I took everything to a big matter.

Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.