Daily Inspiration Quote by Joseph Butler

Butler’s sentence lands like a cool hand on the forehead: stop bargaining with reality. The line is built on a blunt chain of inevitabilities - “are what they are,” “will be what they will be” - that refuses the comforting loopholes people use to wriggle out of moral accountability. It’s not poetic; it’s judicial. Once you accept that actions carry consequences independent of your opinions, the desire to be deceived starts to look less like ignorance and more like complicity.

The subtext is sharper than a generic call for honesty. Butler is aiming at a very specific spiritual habit: self-deception dressed up as good faith. In an 18th-century Anglican context, where moral philosophy and theology were wrestling with the era’s rising rationalism, Butler’s move is to make clear-eyed realism a religious duty. If God’s moral order is stable, then pretending otherwise isn’t just foolish; it’s a kind of rebellion against the structure of the world. His famous project in works like Fifteen Sermons was to argue that conscience is a real faculty, not a social ornament, and that people routinely muffle it for convenience.

The rhetorical question at the end is the trapdoor. It assumes the only plausible answer is: we shouldn’t. Yet it also hints at why we do: because deception offers short-term emotional relief when the cost of truth is change. Butler’s intent isn’t to scold unbelievers; it’s to indict the believer who wants salvation without self-knowledge.