William Ralph Inge Quotes

Don't get up from the feast of life without paying for your share of it.

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

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

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.

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

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

There are no rewards or punishments - only consequences.

Religion is caught, not taught.

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

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.

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.

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

To marry is to get a binocular view of life.

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.

To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.

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

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.

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

Philosophy means thinking things out for oneself. Ultimately, there can be only one true philosophy, since reason is one and we all live in the same world.

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.

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

God does not always punish a nation by sending it adversity. More often He gives the oppressors their hearts' desire, and sends leanness withal into their soul.

True faith is belief in the reality of absolute values.

The church that is married to the spirit of this age, becomes a widow in the next.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The soul is dyed by the color of its leisure hours.

Action is the normal completion of the act of will which begins as prayer. That action is not always external, but it is always some kind of effective energy.

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

The Devil deserves zero tolerance.

The vulgar mind always mistakes the exceptional for the important.

No healthy civilization can ever be reared on a foundation of devitalized work.

The fruit of the tree of knowledge always drives man from some paradise or other; and even the paradise of fools is not an unpleasant abode while it is habitable.

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

Originality, I fear, is too often only undetected and frequently unconscious plagiarism.

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

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.

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.

It is becoming impossible for those who mix at all with their fellow-men to believe that the grace of God is distributed denominationally.

Civilization is a disease which is almost invariably fatal.

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

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

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

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

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