Quotes from William Ralph Inge

Consciousness is a phase of mental life which arises in connection with the formation of new habits. When habit is formed, consciousness only interferes to spoil our performance.

Public opinion, a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to the average person.

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

Joy is the triumph of life; it is the sign that we are living our true life as spiritual beings.

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

To marry is to get a binocular view of life.

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.

The game of life is worth playing, but the struggle is the prize.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due.

Nature takes away any faculty that is not used.

Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful, or to discover something that is true.

The greatest obstacle to progress is not man's inherited pugnacity, but his incorrigible tendency to parasitism.

My dear, we live in an age of transition.

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

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

Faith is an act of self-consecration in which the will the intellect and the affections all have their place.