To know God better is only to realize how impossible it is that we should ever know him at all. I know not which is more childish to deny him, or define him.
Samuel ButlerRead
Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Belief, much like physical motion, tends to take the easiest route.
This quote suggests that our beliefs are shaped by the path of least resistance, meaning that we often adopt ideas and viewpoints that are the easiest to accept or align with, rather than critically examining them. It highlights the tendency of human nature to avoid challenges and complexities, opting instead for comfort and simplicity in our thinking.
Themes
BeliefResistanceThoughtPhilosophyMindset
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech to encourage critical thinking and openness to new ideas.
More from Samuel Butler
All quotes βAcademic and aristocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that common sense can rarely reach them.
Samuel ButlerRead
An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.
Samuel ButlerRead
Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.
Samuel ButlerRead
People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable.
Samuel ButlerRead
A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.
Samuel ButlerRead
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Every man on earth is sick with the fever of sin, with the blindness of sin and is overcome with its fury. As sins consist mostly of malice and pride, it is necessary to treat everyone who suffers from the malady of sin with kindness and love. This is an important truth, which we often forget. Very often we act in the opposite manner: we add malice to malice by our anger, we oppose pride with pride. Thus, evil grows within us and does not decrease; it is not cured - rather it spreads
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And of the Witch? In the life of a Witch, there is no "after", in the "ever after" of a Witch there is no "happily"; in the story of a Witch, there is no afterword. Of that part that is beyond the life story, beyond the story of the life, there is-alas, or perhaps thank mercy-no telling. She was dead, dead, and gone, and all that was left of her was the carapace of her reputation for malice.
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To get a man soundly saved it is not enough to put on him a pair of new breeches, to give him regular work, or even to give him a University education. These things are all outside a man, and if the inside remains unchanged you have wasted your labor. You must in some way or other graft upon the man's nature a new nature, which has in it the element of the Divine.
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The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.
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