William Ralph Inge Quotes - Page 5

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

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

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

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

The vulgar mind always mistakes the exceptional for the important.

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

My dear, we live in an age of transition.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.