Quotes from William Ralph Inge

There are two kinds of fools: One says, This is old therefore it is good. The other one says, This is new therefore it is better.

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.'

It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion.

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.

Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due.

Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.

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

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

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.

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

Events in the past maybe roughly divided into those which and probably never happened and those which do not matter.

There are two kinds of fools: one says, "This is old, therefore it is good"; the other says, "This is new, therefore it is better.

Mysticism may be defined as the attempt to realise the presence of the living God in the soul and in nature, or, more generally, as the attempt to realise, in thought and feeling, the immanence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal in the temporal.

The Divine nature is Rest," he says in one of the German discourses; and in the Latin fragments we find: "God rests in Himself, and makes all things rest in Him.

What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.

Therefore from the storehouse of His Passion I borrow the price of my debt,

two chief pitfalls into which the mystic is liable to fall--dreamy inactivity and Antinomianism.

it is a harder and a nobler task to preserve detachment in a crowd than in a cell; the little daily sacrifices of family life are often a greater trial than self-imposed mortifications.

the Father is the Fountain-head of the Son, and the Son is the outflowing of the Father; and the Father and Son pour forth the Spirit; and the Unity, which is the essence of the Fountain-head, is also the substance of the three Persons.

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. ~William Ralph Inge

Faith begins as an experiment and ends as an experience.

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

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

All faith consists essentially in the recognition of a world of spiritual values behind, yet not apart from, the world of natural phenomena.