The Way of All Flesh

by Samuel Butler

of this she was assured, with a conviction deeper than she could have attained by any argument founded upon mere reason.

Such a life let us pray God that it may please Him to enable us to pray that we may lead.”

:)

If people who are in a difficulty will only do the first little reasonable thing which they can clearly recognise as reasonable, they will always find the next step more easy both to see and take.

Thus do we build castles in air when flushed with wine and conquest.

I never yet knew a man whose sense of his own importance did not become adequately developed after he had held a resident fellowship for five or six years.

They were chiefly farmers—fat, very well-to-do folk, who had come some of them with their wives and children from outlying farms two and three miles away; haters of popery and of anything which any one might choose to say was popish; good, sensible fellows who detested theory of any kind, whose ideal was the maintenance of the status quo with perhaps a loving reminiscence of old war times, and a sense of wrong that the weather was not more completely under their control, who desired higher prices and cheaper wages, but otherwise were most contented when things were changing least; tolerators, if not lovers, of all that was familiar, haters of all that was unfamiliar; they would have been equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practised.