Quotes by Dean Inge

What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.

— Dean Inge

Wisdom

The wisdom of the wise is an uncommon degree of common sense.

— Dean Inge

Wisdom

A good government remains the greatest of human blessings and no nation has ever enjoyed it.

— Dean Inge

Happiness

Gambling is a disease of barbarians superficially civilized.

— Dean Inge

Wisdom

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

— Dean Inge

Courage

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.

— Dean Inge

Wisdom

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.

— Dean Inge

Love

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.

— Dean Inge

Education

Bereavement is the deepest initiation into the mysteries of human life, an initiation more searching and profound than even happy love.

— Dean Inge

Love

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

— Dean Inge

Wisdom

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.

— Dean Inge

Wisdom

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

— Dean Inge

Wisdom

The object of studying philosophy is to know one's own mind, not other people's.

— Dean Inge

Wisdom

Don't get up from the feast of life without paying for your share of it.

— Dean Inge

Life

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

— Dean Inge

Wisdom

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.

— Dean Inge

Wisdom

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.

— Dean Inge

Life

All faith consists essentially in the recognition of a world of spiritual values behind, yet not apart from, the world of natural phenomena.

— Dean Inge

Life

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

— Dean Inge

Wisdom

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.

— Dean Inge

Wisdom

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

— Dean Inge

Life

Let none of us delude himself by supposing that honesty is always the best policy. It is not.

— Dean Inge

Truth

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.

— Dean Inge

Wisdom

A cat can be trusted to purr when she is pleased, which is more than can be said for human beings.

— Dean Inge

Life