Top 30 William Inge Quotes

To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.

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

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

Many people believe that they are attracted by God, or by Nature, when they are only repelled by man.

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

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

Originality is undetected plagiarism.

Bereavement is the sharpest challenge to our trust in God; if faith can overcome this, there is no mountain which it cannot remove.

There are no rewards or punishments – only consequences.

The wise man is he who knows the relative value of things.

I think middle-age is the best time, if we can escape the fatty degeneration of the conscience which often sets in at about fifty.

Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.

What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.

Gambling is a disease of barbarians superficially civilized.

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.

Democracy is only an experiment in government, and it has the obvious disadvantage of merely counting votes instead of weighing them.

True faith is belief in the reality of absolute values.

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.

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.

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.

No Christian can be a pessimist, for Christianity is a system of radical optimism.

In dealing with Englishmen you can be sure of one thing only, that the logical solution will not be adopted.

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

Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter.

It was said that Mr. Gladstone could persuade most people of most things, and himself of anything.

Every institution not only carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution, but prepares the way for its most hated rival.

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.

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.

I have no fear that the candle lighted in Palestine years ago will ever be put out.

The happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except that they are so.