Love Quote by Joseph Butler

Butler’s line is a gentle reprimand dressed up as etiquette: a reminder that verbosity can be a kind of social aggression. He isn’t praising silence as moral superiority so much as arguing for a civic courtesy in conversation - an early 18th-century plea for rhetorical self-control. In the world Butler inhabited, talk was status: the drawing room, the pulpit, the pamphlet. To “love fewer words” reads, at first, like a minor preference. Butler makes it a matter of regard. If you dominate the air, you don’t merely bore people; you fail them.

The phrase “inoffensive sort of people” is slyly double-edged. It sounds condescending, but it also protects the quiet. The subtext is that the composed, restrained temperament is socially vulnerable: not weak, just outgunned. Butler’s “deserve some regard” frames attention as something owed, not won by force of personality. That’s the cleric’s moral instinct showing: manners as ethics, conversation as a test of humility.

Then comes the sting: “though of too still and composed tempers for you.” That “for you” turns the lesson personal. It implies a particular audience - the talkative, performative, perhaps self-satisfied speaker who mistakes speed and quantity for intelligence. Butler isn’t outlawing eloquence; he’s insisting that speech should have an audience, not just an outlet. The line works because it flatters no one: it dignifies the quiet without romanticizing them, and it chastises the loud without outright condemnation. It’s restraint as a social virtue, delivered with the calm firmness of someone used to being listened to.