William Ralph Inge Quotes - Page 2

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

Religion is caught, not taught.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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 marry is to get a binocular view of life.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

The great discovery of the nineteenth century, that we are of one blood with the lower animals, has created new ethical obligations which have not yet penetrated the public conscience. The clerical profession has been lamentably remiss in preaching this obvious duty.

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

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.

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

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

The Devil deserves zero tolerance.

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