Quotes by William Temple

• 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.
• The first glass is for myself, the second for my friends, the third for good humor, and the forth for my enemies.
• You may keep your beauty and your health, unless you destroy them yourself, or discourage them to stay with you, by using them ill.
• The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child's home.
• When I pray, coincidences happen, and when I don't, they don't.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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?
• The only way for a rich man to be healthy is by exercise and abstinence, to live as if he were poor.
• Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.
• The first ingredient in conversation is truth, the next good sense, the third good humor, and the fourth wit.
• 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.
• 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.
• Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they passed.
• 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.
• Man's wisdom is his best friend; folly his worst enemy.
• No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.