William Ralph Inge Quotes

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

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.

Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. This is what makes the trade of historian so attractive.

I believe that the accumulated experience of mankind, and his wonderful discoveries, are of great value. I only point out that they do not constitute real-progress in human nature itself,...

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.

"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."

It takes in reality only one to make a quarrel. It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favour of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion

The fruit of the tree of knowledge, always drives man from some paradise or other.

On the whole, the happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except the fact that they are so.

There are of course no beginnings or ends in history. We may walk for a few miles by the side of a river, noting its shadows and its rapids, the gorges which confine it and the plains through which it meanders; but we know that we have seen neither the beginning nor the end of its course, that the whole river has an unbroken continuity, and that sections, whether of space or time, are purely arbitrary. We are always sowing our future; we are always reaping our past.

Faith begins as an experiment and ends as an experience.

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.

"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.

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

Civilization is a disease which is almost invariably fatal.