William Ralph Inge Quotes

The whole of creation, with all of its laws, is a revelation of God.

The happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except that they are so.

Prayer gives a man the opportunity of getting to know a gentleman he hardly ever meets. I do not mean his maker, but himself.

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours.

"This is old, therefore it is good"; the other says, "This is new, therefore it is better."

Take away fear, and the battle of Freedom is half won.

Civilization is being poisoned by its own waste products.

When our first parents were driven out of Paradise, Adam is believed to have remarked to Eve, "My dear, we live in an age of transition."

The statistics of suicide show that, for non-combatants at least, life is more interesting in war than in peace.

Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.

But the instinct of hoarding, like all other instincts, tends to become hypertrophied and perverted; and with the institution of private property comes another institution-that of plunder and brigandage. In private life, no motive of action is at present so powerful and so persistent as acquisitiveness, which unlike most other desires, knows no satiety. The average man is rich enough when he has a little more than he has got, and not till then.

Deliberate cruelty to our defenceless and beautiful little cousins is surely one of the meanest and most detestable vices of which a human being can be guilty.

Faith is an act of rational choice, which determines us to act as if certain things were true, and in the confident expectation that they will prove to be true.

The object of studying philosophy is to know one's own mind, not other peoples.

It is astonishing with how little wisdom mankind can be governed, when that little wisdom is its own.

Consciousness is a phase of mental life which arises in connection with the formation of new habits. When habit is formed, consciousness only interferes to spoil our performance.

To marry is to get a binocular view of life.

Our test is infallible. Whatever view of reality deepens our sense of the tremendous issues of life in the world wherein we move, is for us nearer the truth than any view which diminishes that sense.

The modern world belongs to the half-educated, a rather difficult class, because they do not realize how little they know.

A man is never so truly and intensely himself as when he is most possessed by God. It is impossible to say where, in the spiritual life, the human will leaves off and divine grace begins.

The right use of leisure is no doubt a harder problem than the right use of our working hours. The soul is dyed the color of its leisure thoughts.

The church is only a secular institution in which the half-educated speak to the half-converted.

The greatest obstacle to progress is not man's inherited pugnacity, but his incorrigible tendency to parasitism.

No Christian can be a pessimist, for Christianity is a system of radical optimism.

Originality is undetected plagiarism.

Man will never be entirely willing to give up this world for the next nor the next world for this.

Hatred toward any human being cannot exist in the same heart as love to God.

Man, as we know him, is a poor creature; he is halfway between an ape and a god and he is travelling in the right direction.

My dear, we live in an age of transition.

The happy people are those who are producing something.

Patriotism varies, from a noble devotion to a moral lunacy.

The Devil deserves zero tolerance.

If the universe is running down like a clock, the clock must have been wound up at a date which we could name if we knew it. The world, if it is to have an end in time, must have had a beginning in time.

Let none of us delude himself by supposing that honesty is always the best policy. It is not.

Let us remember, when we are inclined to be disheartened, that the private soldier is a poor judge of the fortunes of a great battle.

We must cut our coat according to our cloth, and adapt ourselves to changing circumstances.

Christianity promises to make men free; it never promises to make them independent.

Boredom is a certain sign that we are allowing our faculties to rust in idleness.

The vulgar mind always mistakes the exceptional for the important.

The strongest wish of a vast number of earnest men and women to-day is for a basis of religious belief which shall rest, not upon tradition or external authority or historical evidence, but upon the ascertainable facts of human experience. The craving for immediacy, which we have seen to be characteristic of all mysticism, now takes the form of a desire to establish the validity of the God-consciousness as a normal part of the healthy inner life.

There are no rewards or punishments - only consequences.

In dealing with Englishmen you can be sure of one thing only, that the logical solution will not be adopted.

The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values.

The whole of nature, as has been said, is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and in the passive.

The average man is rich enough when he has a little more than he has got.

The game of life is worth playing, but the struggle is the prize.

Bereavement is the deepest initiation into the mysteries of human life, an initiation more searching and profound than even happy love.

There is no limit to the noble aspirations which the words "my country" may evoke.