Daily Inspiration Quote by Joseph Butler

Butler is selling restraint, but he does it with a cool piece of psychological accounting: passions are elastic, pleasures are not. You can keep feeding desire past its “natural stint and bound” - anger, ambition, jealousy, even romantic obsession - because those forces self-amplify. They don’t merely want an object; they want more wanting. Enjoyment, by contrast, has a hard ceiling. The senses dull, novelty wears off, the body taps out. The thrill you chase can only be “in a determinate measure and degree,” no matter how aggressively you try to goose it.

The intent is moral, yes, but the method is almost clinical. Butler doesn’t thunder about sin; he points to a mismatch in the human design. When the engine of appetite can rev indefinitely but the road of satisfaction ends quickly, you get a built-in recipe for misery. That’s the subtext: vice isn’t only wrong, it’s inefficient. It promises infinite returns on a finite investment, then leaves you with an overgrown passion and an underwhelming payoff.

Context matters. As an 18th-century Anglican clergyman pushing back against both libertine confidence and tidy rationalist accounts of virtue, Butler frames morality as aligned with human nature rather than opposed to it. He anticipates a modern insight: addiction, consumerism, and outrage culture all exploit the same asymmetry. The quote works because it shifts ethics from rule-following to realism about how we’re wired - and quietly implies that self-government isn’t piety’s burden, it’s sanity’s price.