William Ralph Inge

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.

Don't get up from the feast of life without paying for your share of it.

Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due.

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

Bereavement is the deepest initiation into the mysteries of human life, an initiation more searching and profound than even happy love.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Gambling is a disease of barbarians superficially civilized.

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

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

Experience is a good teacher, but her fees are very high.

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

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

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

The modern world belongs to the half-educated, a rather difficult class, because they do not realize how little they know.

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

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