William Ralph Inge Men Quotations

The wise man is he who knows the relative value of things.

In praising science, it does not follow that we must adopt the very poor philosophies which scientific men have constructed. In philosophy they have much more to learn than to teach.

Man, as we know him, is a poor creature; he is halfway between an ape and a god and he is travelling in the right direction.

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

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.

Man will never be entirely willing to give up this world for the next nor the next world for this.

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.

The jealous man is so preoccupied with what he hasn't got that he fails to appreciate the value of what he has got. He loses the ability to feel glad because the sun is shining. He doesn't see the wonder and the newness of the beginning of spring.

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

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.

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.

It is becoming impossible for those who mix at all with their fellow-men to believe that the grace of God is distributed denominationally.

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

Christianity promises to make men free; it never promises to make them independent.

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