Top 100 William Ralph Inge Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I have no fear that the candle lighted in Palestine years ago will ever be put out.”

— William Ralph Inge

52. “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

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

— William Ralph Inge

54. “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

55. “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.”

— William Ralph Inge

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

— William Ralph Inge

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

— William Ralph Inge

58. “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.”

— William Ralph Inge

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

— William Ralph Inge

60. “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.”

— William Ralph Inge

61. “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.”

— William Ralph Inge

62. “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

63. “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.”

— William Ralph Inge

64. “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

65. “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.”

— William Ralph Inge

66. “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

67. “There is no limit to the noble aspirations which the words “my country” may evoke.”

— William Ralph Inge

68. “Civilization is a disease which is almost invariably fatal.”

— William Ralph Inge

69. “Let none of us delude himself by supposing that honesty is always the best policy. It is not.”

— William Ralph Inge

70. “The greatest obstacle to progress is not man’s inherited pugnacity, but his incorrigible tendency to parasitism.”

— William Ralph Inge

71. “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

72. “Don’t get up from the feast of life without paying for your share of it.”

— William Ralph Inge

73. “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

74. “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.”

— William Ralph Inge

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

— William Ralph Inge

76. “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.”

— William Ralph Inge

77. “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

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

— William Ralph Inge

79. “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.”

— William Ralph Inge

80. “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.”

— William Ralph Inge

81. “True faith is belief in the reality of absolute values.”

— William Ralph Inge

82. “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.”

— William Ralph Inge

83. “The vulgar mind always mistakes the exceptional for the important.”

— William Ralph Inge

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

— William Ralph Inge

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

— William Ralph Inge

86. “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

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

— William Ralph Inge

88. “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

89. “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

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

— William Ralph Inge

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

— William Ralph Inge

92. “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.”

— William Ralph Inge

93. “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

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

— William Ralph Inge

95. “It is astonishing with how little wisdom mankind can be governed, when that little wisdom is its own.”

— William Ralph Inge

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

— William Ralph Inge

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

— William Ralph Inge

98. “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

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

— William Ralph Inge

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

— William Ralph Inge