Explore Quotes by William Ralph Inge

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

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

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

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

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.

What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.

We tolerate shapes in human beings that would horrify us if we saw them in a horse.

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

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.