William Temple Quotes (31 Quotes)

So that a paradise, among them seems to have been a large space of ground adorned and beautified with all sorts of trees, both of fruits and of forest, either found there before it was enclosed, or planted after either cultivated like gardens, for shades and for walks, with fountains or streams, and all sorts of plants usual in the climate, and pleasant to the eye, the smell, or the taste or else employed like our parks, for enclosure and harbor of all sorts of wild beasts, as well, as for the pleasure of riding and walking and so they were of more or less extent, and of different entertainment, according to the several humors of the Princes that ordered and enclosed them.

Christianity is the most materialistic of all religions

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Human status ought not to depend upon the changing demands of the economic process. 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 (later Archbishop of Canterbury).

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.

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

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

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

Truth will be uppermost one time or another, like cork, though kept down in the water.

Science has its being in a perpetual mental restlessness.

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.

Leisure and solitude are the best effect of riches, because the mother of thought. Both are avoided by most rich men, who seek company and business, which are signs of being weary of themselves.

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?

Reacting to evangelists' fondness for quoting Isaiah 118, 'Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow....' All my sins are grey.

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

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

In the days of His earthly ministry, only those could speak to him who came where He was if He was in Galilee, men could not find Him in Jerusalem if He was in Jerusalem, men could not find Him in Galilee. His Ascension means that He is perfectly united with God we are with Him wherever we are present to God and that is everywhere and always. Because He is 'in Heaven' He is everywhere on earth because He is ascended, He is here now. Our devotion is not to hold us by the empty tomb it must lift up our hearts to heaven so that we too 'in heart and mind thither accent and with Him continually dwell' it must also send us forth into the world to do His will and these are not two things, but one.