Dean Inge Quotes (37 Quotes)

The belief in progress, not as an ideal but as an indisputable fact, not as a task for humanity but as a law of Nature, has been the working faith of the West for about a hundred and fifty years.

The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born.

Bereavement is the sharpest challenge to our trust in God; if faith can overcome this, there is no mountain which it cannot remove.

Action is the normal completion of the act of will which begins as prayer. That action is not always external, but it is always some kind of effective energy.

The soul is dyed with the color of its leisure thoughts.

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.

A good government remains the greatest of human blessings and no nation has ever enjoyed it.

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.

If the universe is running down like a clock, the clock must have been wound up at a date which we could name if we knew it. The world, if it is to have an end in time, must have had a beginning in time.

What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.

There is no law of progress. Our future is in our own hands, to make or to mar. It will be an uphill fight to the end, and would we have it otherwise Let no one suppose that evolution will ever exempt us from struggle. You forget, said the Devil, with a chuckle, that I have been evolving too.

A cat can be trusted to purr when she is pleased, which is more than can be said for human beings.

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.

I have no fear that the candle lighted in Palestine years ago will ever be put out.

Faith always contains an element of risk, of venture; and we are impelled to make the venture by the affinity and attraction which we feel in ourselves.

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

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.

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.

We tolerate shapes in human beings that would horrify us if we saw them in a horse.

The wisdom of the wise is an uncommon degree of common sense.

It was said that Mr. Gladstone could persuade most people of most things, and himself of anything.

Democracy is only an experiment in government, and it has the obvious disadvantage of merely counting votes instead of weighing them.

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 object of studying philosophy is to know one's own mind, not other people's.

Faith is an act of rational choice, which determines us to act as if certain things were true, and in the confident expectation that they will prove to be true.

Bereavement is the deepest initiation into the mysteries of human life, an initiation more searching and profound than even happy love.

Let none of us delude himself by supposing that honesty is always the best policy. It is not.

Is there, as the medieval mystics taught, a spark at the core of the Soul, which never consents to evil, a Divine nucleus in the heart of the personality, which can take no stain

Admiration for ourselves and our institutions is too often measured by our contempt and dislike for foreigners.

It is becoming impossible for those who mix with their fellowmen to believe that the grace of God is distributed denominationally.

Gambling is a disease of barbarians superficially civilized.

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

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.

To marry is to get a binocular view of life.

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.

All faith consists essentially in the recognition of a world of spiritual values behind, yet not apart from, the world of natural phenomena.

It takes in reality only one to make a quarrel. It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion.