William Ralph Inge famous quotes

Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Life #Happiness #Wisdom

The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Education #Knowledge #Facts

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.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Cousin #Animal #Humanity

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

#Cat #Said #Humans

Take away fear, and the battle of Freedom is half won.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Battle #Half

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

#Vegetarianism #Sheep #Different Opinions

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

#Reflection #Theatre #Theater

The happy people are those who are producing something...
-- William Ralph Inge

#People #Happy People

Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Art #Writing #Half

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

#Prayer #Mean #Opportunity

I have never understood why it should be considered derogatory to the Creator to suppose that he has a sense of humour.
-- William Ralph Inge

#God #Should #Humour

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

#Peace #Men #Bayonets

No Christian can be a pessimist, for Christianity is a system of radical optimism.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Christian #Optimism #Grace

Originality is undetected plagiarism.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Originality #Plagiarism

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.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Beautiful #Cousin #Animal

What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Funny #Creativity #Originality

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

#Happiness #Happy #Success

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

#Inspirational #Children #Character

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

#Blessing #Government #Humans

Even the paradise of fools is not an unpleasant abode while it is inhabitable.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Heaven #Fool #Paradise

Religion is caught, not taught.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Religion #Taught #Caught

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.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Struggle #Fighting #Hands

There are no rewards or punishments - only consequences.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Punishment #Rewards #Consequence

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

#Wisdom #Littles #Mankind

The wisdom of the wise is an uncommon degree of common sense.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Wise #Wisdom #Common Sense

The world belongs to those who think and act with it, who keep a finger on its pulse.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Thinking #World #Pulse

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

#Men #Progress #Obstacles

All human love is a holy thing, the holiest thing in our experience.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Love Is #Free Love #Holy

The vulgar mind always mistakes the exceptional for the important.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Mistake #Mind #Important

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.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Running #Names #World

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.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Grief #Stronger #World

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.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Perspective #Trouble

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

#Spiritual #World #Recognition

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.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Risk #Elements #Venture

No word in our language not even "Socialism" has been employed more loosely than " Mysticism ." ... The history of the word begins in close connexion with the Greek mysteries. A mystic is one who has been, or is being, initiated into some esoteric knowledge of Divine things, about which he must keep his mouth shut...
-- William Ralph Inge

#Greek #Mouths #Esoteric

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

#Believe #Men #Grace

Civilization is a disease which is almost invariably fatal.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Civilization #Disease

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

#Suicide #War #Interesting

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

#Self #Affection #Intellect

The average man is rich enough when he has a little more than he has got.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Men #Average #Littles

The soul is dyed by the color of its leisure hours.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Color #Soul #Leisure

Lutheranism is essentially German... It worships a God who is neither just nor merciful.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Superstitions #Belief #Worship

The effect of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions, and would soon bring to an end all the static Utopias and the farmyard civilization of the Fabians.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Civilization #Boredom #Revolution

Originality, I fear, is too often only undetected and frequently unconscious plagiarism.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Originality #Plagiarism #Unconscious

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.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Powerful #Men #Average

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.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Philosophy #Men #Doe

To marry is to get a binocular view of life.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Views

We must cut our coat according to our cloth, and adapt ourselves to changing circumstances.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Cutting #Clothes #Coats

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.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Adversity #Heart #Giving

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

#Church #Half #Speak

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

#Two #Religion #World

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

#Country #Military #Noble

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."
-- William Ralph Inge

#Parent #Age #Paradise

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

#Giving Up #Men #World

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.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Spring #Jealous #Men

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

#Believe #Men #History

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.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Character #Judging #Personality

Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Age #Society #Next

The wealth of a soul is measured by how much it can feel; its poverty by how little.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Soul #Poverty #Littles

Patriotism varies, from a noble devotion to a moral lunacy.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Patriotism #Noble #Moral

The wise man is he who knows the relative value of things.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Wise #Men #Relative

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.
-- William Ralph Inge

#God #Thinking #Play

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.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Real #Thinking #Two

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.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Phases #Connections #Consciousness

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

#Logical #Adopted #Englishmen

Public opinion, a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to the average person.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Average #Tyrants #Public Opinion

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.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Thinking #Age #Fifty

Every institution not only carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution, but prepares the way for its most hated rival.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Way #Rivals #Institutions

The enemies of freedom do not argue; they shout and they shoot.
-- William Ralph Inge

#Freedom #Technology #Enemy

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

#Sarcastic #Wise #Sarcasm