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1 " It is quite natural and inevitable that, if we spend sixteen hours daily of our waking lives in thinking about the affairs of the world and five minutes in thinking about God and our souls, this world will seem two hundred times more real to us than God. "
― William Ralph Inge
2 " 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. "
3 " Faith begins as an experiment and ends as an experience. "
4 " Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due. "
5 " 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. "
6 " It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion. "
7 " Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next. "
8 " A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and a common hatred of its neighbors. "
9 " what is originality ? undetected plagiarism! "
10 " The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born. "
11 " Many people believe that they are attracted by God, or by Nature, when they are only repelled by man. "
12 " Events in the past maybe roughly divided into those which and probably never happened and those which do not matter. "
13 " 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. "
14 " 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 "
15 " Our real self is not the captive of Space and Time "
16 " 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. "
― William Ralph Inge , Light, Life and Love: Selections from the German Mystics of the Middle Ages
17 " Therefore from the storehouse of His Passion I borrow the price of my debt, "
18 " two chief pitfalls into which the mystic is liable to fall--dreamy inactivity and Antinomianism. "
19 " it is a harder and a nobler task to preserve detachment in a crowd than in a cell; the little daily sacrifices of family life are often a greater trial than self-imposed mortifications. "
20 " Mysticism may be defined as the attempt to realise the presence of the living God in the soul and in nature, or, more generally, as the attempt to realise, in thought and feeling, the immanence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal in the temporal. "
― William Ralph Inge , Christian Mysticism