Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

William Ralph Inge

English Prelate, Dean of Westminster, Writer

"Take away fear, and the battle of Freedom is half won."

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

"The church is only a secular institution in which the half-educated speak to the half-converted."

"The command ?Be fruitful and multiply? was promulgated, according to our authorities, when the population of the world consisted of two people."

"The Divine nature is Rest, he says in one of the German discourses; and in the Latin fragments we find: God rests in Himself, and makes all things rest in Him."

"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."

"The fruit of the tree of knowledge always drives man from some paradise or other; and even the paradise of fools is not an unpleasant abode while it is habitable."

"The fruit of the tree of knowledge always drives man from some paradise or another."

"The game of life is worth playing, but the struggle is the prize."

"The great discovery of the nineteenth century, that we are of one blood with the lower animals, has created new ethical obligations which have not yet penetrated the public conscience. The clerical profession has been lamentably remiss in preaching this obvious duty."

"The happy people are those who are producing something; the bored people are those who are consuming much and producing nothing."

"The jealous man is so preoccupied with what he hasn't got that he fails to appreciate the value of what he has got. He loses the ability to feel glad because the sun is shining. He doesn't see the wonder and the newness of the beginning of spring."

"The modern world belongs to the half-educated, a rather difficult class, because they do not realize how little they know."

"The phase of thought or feeling which we call Mysticism has its origin in that which is the raw material of all religion, and perhaps of all philosophy and art as well, namely, that dim consciousness of the beyond, which is part of our nature as human beings. Men have given different names to these "obstinate questionings of sense and outward things." We may call them, if we will, a sort of higher instinct, perhaps an anticipation of the evolutionary process; or an extension of the frontier of consciousness; or, in religious language, the voice of God speaking to us. Mysticism arises when we try to bring this higher consciousness into relation with the other contents of our minds."

"The right use of leisure is no doubt a harder problem than the right use of our working hours. The soul is dyed the color of its leisure thoughts."

"The soul is dyed by the color of its leisure hours."

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

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

"The strongest wish of a vast number of earnest men and women to-day is for a basis of religious belief which shall rest, not upon tradition or external authority or historical evidence, but upon the ascertainable facts of human experience. The craving for immediacy, which we have seen to be characteristic of all mysticism, now takes the form of a desire to establish the validity of the God-consciousness as a normal part of the healthy inner life."

"The vulgar mind always mistakes the exceptional for the important."

"The wealth of a soul is measured by how much it can feel; its poverty by how little."

"The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive."

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

"The world belongs to those who think and act with it, who keep a finger on its pulse."

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

"There are no rewards or punishments - only consequences."

"There are two kinds of fools: one says, "This is old, therefore it is good"; the other says, "This is new, therefore it is better.""

"There is much more of the same kind in Eckhart's sermons ? as good and sensible doctrine as one could find anywhere."

"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 struggles. 'You forget,' said the Devil, with a chuckle, 'that I have been evolving too.'"

"They who will live for others shall have great troubles, but they shall seem to them small. Those who will live for themselves shall have small troubles, but they shall seem to them great."

"This is old, therefore it is good; the other says, this is new, therefore it is better."

"To marry is to get a binocular view of life."

"True contemplation considers Reality (or Being) in its manifestations as well as in its origin. If this is remembered, there need be no conflict between social morality and the inner life. Eckhart recognizes that it is a harder and a nobler task to preserve detachment in a crowd than in a cell; the little daily sacrifices of family life are often a greater trial than self-imposed mortifications. "We need not destroy any little good in ourselves for the sake of a better, but we should strive to grasp every truth in its highest meaning, for no one good contradicts another." "Love God, and do as you like, say the Free Spirits. Yes; but as long as you like anything contrary to God's will, you do not love Him.""

"True faith is belief in the reality of absolute values."

"Two chief pitfalls into which the mystic is liable to fall--dreamy inactivity and Antinomianism."

"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."

"We must cut our coat according to our cloth, and adapt ourselves to changing circumstances."

"We shall have to fight the politician, who remembers only that the unborn have no votes and that since posterity has done nothing for us we need do nothing for posterity."

"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."

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

"What is a socialist? One who has yearnings to share equal profits from unequal earnings."

"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.""

"Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next."