Daily Inspiration Quote by Dennis Potter

Potter doesn’t romanticize faith as a soothing journey; he treats it like a brute fact of temperament, an on/off switch that refuses to be litigated into existence. “You can’t get a handle on it” is doing double duty: it mocks the tidy, managerial language we use to domesticate big mysteries, and it admits a kind of defeat. Religion won’t sit still long enough for analysis to pin it down. You either have the inward “know” or you don’t.

The subtext is distinctly Potter: suspicion of pieties, impatience with institutions, and a dramatist’s ear for how belief functions in real people. By collapsing the usual spectrum (doubt, longing, bargaining, moral effort) into a binary, he’s not necessarily arguing that faith is simple; he’s arguing that the mechanisms that produce faith are opaque. Reason can build scaffolding around belief, but it can’t reliably manufacture the initial spark. That’s a provocation aimed at both the devout, who often claim belief as virtue, and the secular rationalist, who expects every conviction to submit to explanation.

Context matters because Potter wrote in a Britain where Christianity lingered as cultural weather even as personal observance faded. His work obsessively probes the gap between official narratives and private experience, especially under pressure of illness and mortality. The line reads like a man allergic to performative certainty: if belief is real, it’s not a rhetorical pose or a social membership card. It’s something you “know” in the bones, or not at all, and no amount of clever talk will substitute for that inconvenient fact.