William Ralph Inge Quotes

Experience proves that none is so cruel as the disillusioned sentimentalist.

All human love is a holy thing, the holiest thing in our experience.

A monarch frequently represents his subjects better that an elected assembly; and if he is a good judge of character he is likely to have more capable and loyal advisers.

Admiration for ourselves and our institutions is too often measured by our contempt and dislike for foreigners.

Each generation takes a special pleasure in removing the household gods of its parents from their pedestals, and consigning them to the cupboard.

It is quite natural and inevitable that, if we spend sixteen hours daily of our waking lives in thinking about the affairs of the world and five minutes in thinking about God and our souls, this world will seem two hundred times more real to us than God.

Even the paradise of fools is not an unpleasant abode while it is inhabitable.

The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born.

Bereavement is the sharpest challenge to our trust in God; if faith can overcome this, there is no mountain which it cannot remove.

Beautiful thoughts hardly bring us to God until they are acted upon. No one can have a true idea of right until he does it.

The command, 'Be fruitful and multiply', was promulgated, according to our authorities, when the population of the world consisted of two persons.

It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion.

Many people believe that they are attracted by God, or by Nature, when they are only repelled by man.

We tolerate shapes in human beings that would horrify us if we saw them in a horse.

The wisdom of the wise is an uncommon degree of common sense.

Faith always contains an element of risk, of venture; and we are impelled to make the venture by the affinity and attraction which we feel in ourselves.

They who will live for others shall have great troubles, but they shall seem to them small. Those who will live for themselves shall have small troubles, but they shall seem to them great.

We should think of the church as an orchestra in which the different churches play on different instruments while a Divine Conductor calls the tune.

Lutheranism is essentially German... It worships a God who is neither just nor merciful.

True faith is belief in the reality of absolute values.

Democracy is only an experiment in government, and it has the obvious disadvantage of merely counting votes instead of weighing them.

The wise man is he who knows the relative value of things.

All faith consists essentially in the recognition of a world of spiritual values behind, yet not apart from, the world of natural phenomena.

Experience is a good teacher, but her fees are very high.

The happy people are those who are producing something; the bored people are those who are consuming much and producing nothing.

The jealous man is so preoccupied with what he hasn't got that he fails to appreciate the value of what he has got. He loses the ability to feel glad because the sun is shining. He doesn't see the wonder and the newness of the beginning of spring.

Beneath the dingy uniformity of international fashions in dress, man remains what he has always been; a splendid fighting animal, a self-sacrificing hero, and a blood thirsty savage.

We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.

Love remembered and consecrated by grief belongs, more clearly than the happy intercourse of friends, to the eternal world; it has proved itself stronger than death.

Don't break the silence unless you can improve on it.

In praising science, it does not follow that we must adopt the very poor philosophies which scientific men have constructed. In philosophy they have much more to learn than to teach.

If we feel that any habit or pursuit, harmless in itself, is keeping us from God and sinking us deeper in the things of earth; if we find that things which others can do with impunity are for us the occasion of falling, then abstinence is our only course. Abstinence alone can recover for us the real value of what should have been for our help but which has been an occasion of falling. ... It is necessary that we should steadily resolve to give up anything that comes between ourselves and God.

Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater.

A cat can be trusted to purr when she is pleased, which is more than can be said for human beings.

For better or worse, man is the tool-using animal, and as such he has become the lord of creation. When he is lord also of himself, he will deserve his self-chosen title homo sapiens.

Gambling is a disease of barbarians superficially civilized.

What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.

Faith is an act of self-consecration, in which the will, the intellect, and the affections all have their place.

A good government remains the greatest of human blessings and no nation has ever enjoyed it.

Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter.

I have no fear that the candle lighted in Palestine years ago will ever be put out.

Religion is caught, not taught.

Nature takes away any faculty that is not used.

A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit on it.

Joy is the triumph of life; it is the sign that we are living our true life as spiritual beings.

There is no law of progress. Our future is in our own hands, to make or to mar. It will be an uphill fight to the end, and would we have it otherwise? Let no one suppose that evolution will ever exempt us from struggles. 'You forget,' said the Devil, with a chuckle, 'that I have been evolving too.

Over-population is a phenomenon connected with the survival of the unfit, and it is a mechanism which has created conditions favourable to the survival of the unfit and the elimination of the fit.

I think middle-age is the best time, if we can escape the fatty degeneration of the conscience which often sets in at about fifty.