"The tongue may be employed about, and made to serve all the purposes of vice, in tempting and deceiving, in perjury and injustice."
"In all common ordinary cases, we see intuitively at first view what is out duty, what is the honest part. This is the ground of the observation, that the first thought is often the best. In these cases, doubt and deliberation is itself dishonesty; as it was in Balaam upon the second message."
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Source: Joseph Butler (1839). “The Whole Works of Joseph Butler ...”
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"Pain and sorrow and misery have a right to our assistance: compassion puts us in mind of the debt, and that we owe it to ourselves as well as to the distressed."
"Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived?"
"Compassion is a call, a demand of nature, to relieve the unhappy as hunger is a natural call for food"
"But to us, probability is the very guide of life."
"Happiness or satisfaction consists only in the enjoyment of those objects which are by nature suited to our several particular appetites, passions, and affections."