Quotes from William Temple

Art is the effort to appreciate and express the God who is its Beauty.

The best rules to form a young man, are, to talk little, to hear much, to reflect alone upon what has passed in company, to distrust one's own opinions, and value others that deserve it.

Little things are little things; but faithfulness in little things is a very great thing.

I shall conclude with a saying of Alponsus, surnamed the Wise, King of Aragon - that among so many things as are by men possessed or pursued in the course of their lives, all the rest are baubles, besides old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to converse with, and old books to read!

Pharisees—men who lived in the strength of a fellowship that had behind it the greatest religious tradition in all the world, but who, because they trusted more to their tradition than to the God who inspired it, were unable to recognise the still further call of God when it came to them.

No one who is not a Christian in spirit can perform the Christian act; and the Sermon on the Mount is not a code of rules to be mechanically followed; it is the description of the life which any man will spontaneously lead when once the Spirit of Christ has taken complete possession of his heart.

Humility does not mean thinking less of yourself than of other people, nor does it mean having a low opinion of your own gifts. It means freedom from thinking about yourself at all

to lift a man by education from one social stratum to another is to expose him to a terrible temptation—the temptation to despise his own people.

Coinciden?ele sunt mai frecvente atunci când ne rug?m.

Liberty, in so far as it is of any value, always means self-control in both the senses of that term: in the sense that we are only controlled by ourselves, and also in the sense that by ourselves we are controlled, and that every part of our nature is subservient to the purpose to which our whole nature is given.

In our worship we find for the most part what we expect to find.

I am quite sure that the Communion is just the place where we need to be divided until our unity is real.

The first requirement of personality is always freedom—

The first ingredient in conversation is truth, the next good sense, the third good humor, and the fourth wit.

Your religion is what you do with your solitude.

The only way for a rich man to be healthy is by exercise and abstinence, to live as if he were poor.

Authority is by nothing so much strengthened and confirmed as by custom; for no man easily distrusts the things which he and all men have been always bred up to.

The church exists for the sake of those outside it.

I prefer a God who once and for all impressed his will upon creation, to one who continually busied about modifying what he had already done.

Science has its being in a perpetual mental restlessness.

The problem of evil... Why does God permit it? Or, if God is omnipotent, in which case permission and creation are the same, why did God create it?

Our present time is indeed a criticizing and critical time, hovering between the wish, and the inability to believe. Our complaints are like arrows shot up into the air at no target: and with no purpose they only fall back upon our own heads and destroy ourselves.

When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humored a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over.

People that trust wholly to other's charity, and without industry of their own, will always be poor.