Quotes from William Ralph Inge

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.

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

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.

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

Patriotism varies, from a noble devotion to a moral lunacy.

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

I have never understood why it should be considered derogatory to the Creator to suppose that he has a sense of humour.

We should think of the church as an orchestra in which the different churches play on different instruments while a Divine Conductor calls the tune.

Lutheranism is essentially German... It worships a God who is neither just nor merciful.

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.

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.

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 whole of creation, with all of its laws, is a revelation of God.

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

The happy people are those who are producing something.

The happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except that they are so.

Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater.

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

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

Prayer gives a man the opportunity of getting to know a gentleman he hardly ever meets. I do not mean his maker, but himself.

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.

It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favour of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion.

The whole of nature, as has been said, is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and in the passive.