Top 74 Quotes & Sayings by William Ralph Inge - Page 2

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

My dear, we live in an age of transition.

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

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