William Ralph Inge

The world as it is is the world as God sees it, not as we see it. Our vision is distorted, not so much by the limits of finitude as by sin and ignorance. But the more we raise ourselves in the scale of being, the more will our ideas about God and the world correspond to reality.

It is quite natural and inevitable that, if we spend sixteen hours daily of our waking lives in thinking about the affairs of the world and five minutes in thinking about God and our souls, this world will seem two hundred times more real to us than God.

It is astonishing with how little wisdom mankind can be governed, when that little wisdom is its own.

True faith is belief in the reality of absolute values.

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours.

The aim of education is the knowledge not of facts but of values.

We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.

Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due.

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.

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

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

Faith begins as an experiment and ends as an experience.

Faith is an act of self-consecration in which the will the intellect and the affections all have their place.

The statistics of suicide show that for non-combatants at least life is more interesting in war than in peace.

Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful or to discover something that is true.