Quotes by Dean Inge

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.
• A cat can be trusted to purr when she is pleased, which is more than can be said for human beings.
• 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.
• I have no fear that the candle lighted in Palestine years ago will ever be put out.
• All faith consists essentially in the recognition of a world of spiritual values behind, yet not apart from, the world of natural phenomena.
• 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.
• Let none of us delude himself by supposing that honesty is always the best policy. It is not.
• It was said that Mr. Gladstone could persuade most people of most things, and himself of anything.
• Gambling is a disease of barbarians superficially civilized.
• The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born.
• We tolerate shapes in human beings that would horrify us if we saw them in a horse.
• Don't get up from the feast of life without paying for your share of it.
• To marry is to get a binocular view of life.
• The wise man is he who knows the relative value of things.
• Democracy is only an experiment in government, and it has the obvious disadvantage of merely counting votes instead of weighing them.
• A good government remains the greatest of human blessings and no nation has ever enjoyed it.
• The soul is dyed with the color of its leisure thoughts.
• 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.
• The object of studying philosophy is to know one's own mind, not other people's.
• 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.
• Bereavement is the sharpest challenge to our trust in God; if faith can overcome this, there is no mountain which it cannot remove.
• Bereavement is the deepest initiation into the mysteries of human life, an initiation more searching and profound than even happy love.
• 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 wisdom of the wise is an uncommon degree of common sense.