William Temple Quotations

The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child's home.

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.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

When I pray, coincidences happen, and when I don't, they don't.

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

I have always looked upon alchemy in natural philosophy to be like enthusiasm in divinity, and to have troubled the world much to the same purpose.

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.

There cannot live a more unhappy creature than an ill-natured old man, who is neither capable of receiving pleasures, nor sensible of conferring them on others.

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

Man's wisdom is his best friend; folly his worst enemy.

The first glass is for myself, the second for my friends, the third for good humor, and the forth for my enemies.

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?

Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they passed.

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.

No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.

You may keep your beauty and your health, unless you destroy them yourself, or discourage them to stay with you, by using them ill.

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.

Learning passes for wisdom among those who want both.

We shall say without hesitation that the atheist who is moved by love is moved by the Spirit of God; an atheist who lives by love is saved by his faith in the God whose existence (under that name) he denies.

Some of the Fathers went so far as to esteem the love of music a sign of predestination, as a thing divine, and reserved for the felicities of heaven itself.

The greatest pleasure in life is love.

There is no structural organization of society which can bring about the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth since all systems can be perverted by the selfishness of man. The Malvern Manifesto: Drawn up by a Conference of the Province of York, January 10, 1941; signed for the Conference by Temple, then Archbishop of York .

A man's wisdom is his best friend; folly, his worst enemy.

To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God.

True worship is when a person, through their person, attains intimacy and friendship with God.

It is sometimes said that conduct is supremely important and worship helps it. The truth is that worship is supremely important and conduct tests it

Christianity founds hospitals and atheists are cured in them, never knowing they owe their cure to Christ.

If your prayer is selfish, the answer will be something that will rebuke your selfishness. You may not recognize it as having come at all, but it is sure to be there.

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

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.

The greatest medicine is a true friend.

Worship is the submission of all our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness; the nourishment of mind with His truth; the purifying of imagination by His Beauty; the opening of the heart to His love; the surrender of will to His purpose - and all of this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable and therefore the chief remedy for that self-centeredness which is our original sin and the source of all actual sin.

Holland is a country, where the earth is better than the air, and profit more in request than honor; where there is more sense than wit; more good nature than good humor; and more wealth than pleasure; where a man would choose rather to travel than t

There cannot live an unhappier creature than an ill-natured old man, who is neither capable of receiving pleasures, nor sensible of conferring them on others

Courage is not merely a virtue; it is the virtue. Without it, there are no other virtues.

Church is only society on earth that exists for the benefit of non-members.

Good intentions are at least, the seed of good actions; and every one ought to sow them, and leave It to the soil and the seasons whether He or any other gather they fruit

Science has its being in a perpetual mental restlessness.

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.