Best 107 quotes of William Ralph Inge on MyQuotes

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

My dear, we live in an age of transition.

Nature takes away any faculty that is not used.

Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful or to discover something that is true.

No Christian can be a pessimist, for Christianity is a system of radical optimism.

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

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.

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

Originality is undetected plagiarism.

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.

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.

Patriotism varies, from a noble devotion to a moral lunacy.

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.

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

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

The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values.

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

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

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

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

The Devil deserves zero tolerance.

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 enemies of freedom do not argue; they shout and they shoot.

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

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.

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

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

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

The happy people are those who are producing something.

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.

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

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

There are no rewards or punishments - only consequences.

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.

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

The right use of leisure is no doubt a harder problem than the right use of our working hours. The soul is dyed the color of its leisure thoughts.

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

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

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.

The vulgar mind always mistakes the exceptional for the important.

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

The whole of creation, with all of its laws, is a revelation of God.

The whole of nature, as has been said, is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and in the passive.

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

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

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

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

True faith is belief in the reality of absolute values.

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.