William Ralph Inge
Don't break the silence unless you can improve on it.Collection: Silence
Experience is a good teacher, but her fees are very high.Collection: Teacher
The happy people are those who are producing something; the bored people are those who are consuming much and producing nothing.Collection: Happiness
The soul is dyed by the color of its leisure hours.Collection: Color
The object of studying philosophy is to know one's own mind, not other peoples.Collection: Philosophy
Nature takes away any faculty that is not used.Collection: Nature
Civilization is being poisoned by its own waste products.Collection: Civilization
Beautiful thoughts hardly bring us to God until they are acted upon. No one can have a true idea of right until he does it.Collection: Beautiful
A man is never so truly and intensely himself as when he is most possessed by God. It is impossible to say where, in the spiritual life, the human will leaves off and divine grace begins.Collection: Spiritual
Faith begins as an experiment, and ends as an experience.Collection: Ends
Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful or to discover something that is true.Collection: Beauty
The happy people are those who are producing something.Collection: Inspirational
Joy is the triumph of life; it is the sign that we are living our true life as spiritual beings.Collection: Spiritual
Take away fear, and the battle of Freedom is half won.Collection: Battle
Boredom is a certain sign that we are allowing our faculties to rust in idleness.Collection: Book
Civilization is a disease which is almost invariably fatal.Collection: Civilization
Hatred toward any human being cannot exist in the same heart as love to God.Collection: Heart
Man will never be entirely willing to give up this world for the next nor the next world for this.Collection: Giving Up
A monarch frequently represents his subjects better that an elected assembly; and if he is a good judge of character he is likely to have more capable and loyal advisers.Collection: Character
When our first parents were driven out of Paradise, Adam is believed to have remarked to Eve, "My dear, we live in an age of transition."Collection: Parent
For better or worse, man is the tool-using animal, and as such he has become the lord of creation. When he is lord also of himself, he will deserve his self-chosen title homo sapiens.Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Moving
The whole of creation, with all of its laws, is a revelation of God.Collection: God
The statistics of suicide show that, for non-combatants at least, life is more interesting in war than in peace.Collection: Suicide
It is becoming impossible for those who mix at all with their fellow-men to believe that the grace of God is distributed denominationally.Collection: Believe
The average man is rich enough when he has a little more than he has got.Collection: Men
Faith is an act of self-consecration, in which the will, the intellect, and the affections all have their place.Collection: Self
The vulgar mind always mistakes the exceptional for the important.Collection: Mistake
All human love is a holy thing, the holiest thing in our experience.Collection: Love Is
My dear, we live in an age of transition.Collection: Age
No healthy civilization can ever be reared on a foundation of devitalized work.Collection: Civilization
Admiration for ourselves and our institutions is too often measured by our contempt and dislike for foreigners.Collection: Admiration
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.Collection: Judging
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.Collection: Heart
The world belongs to those who think and act with it, who keep a finger on its pulse.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Fashion
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.Collection: Civilization
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.Collection: Knowledge
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.Collection: Religious
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.Collection: Powerful
Even the paradise of fools is not an unpleasant abode while it is inhabitable.Collection: Heaven
The game of life is worth playing, but the struggle is the prize.Collection: Struggle
We must cut our coat according to our cloth, and adapt ourselves to changing circumstances.Collection: Cutting
Over-population is a phenomenon connected with the survival of the unfit, and it is a mechanism which has created conditions favourable to the survival of the unfit and the elimination of the fit.Collection: Survival
They who will live for others shall have great troubles, but they shall seem to them small. Those who will live for themselves shall have small troubles, but they shall seem to them great.Collection: Perspective
The wealth of a soul is measured by how much it can feel; its poverty by how little.Collection: Simplicity
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.Collection: Real
Religion is caught, not taught.Collection: Religion
The church that is married to the spirit of this age, becomes a widow in the next.Collection: Age
Patriotism varies, from a noble devotion to a moral lunacy.Collection: Patriotic