William Temple Quotes & Sayings

Religion is what you do with your solitude. — William Temple

To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God. — William Temple

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. — William Temple

Humility does not mean thinking less of yourself than of other people, nor does it mean having a low opinion of your own gifts. It means freedom from thinking about yourself one way or the other at all ... The humility which consists in being a great deal occupied about yourself, and saying you are of little worth, is not Christian humility. It is one form of self-occupation and a very poor and futile one at that. — William Temple

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new. — William Temple

Worship is the submission of all our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness; the nourishment of mind with His truth; the purifying of imagination by His Beauty; the opening of the heart to His love; the surrender of will to His purpose - and all of this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable and therefore the chief remedy for that self-centeredness which is our original sin and the source of all actual sin. — William Temple

The greatest medicine is a true friend. — William Temple

Worship is the submission of all of our nature to God. It is the quickening of the conscience by his holiness; the nourishment of mind with his truth; the purifying of imagination by his beauty; the opening of the heart to his love; the surrender of will to his purpose
all this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable. — William Temple

The most influential of all educational factor is the conversation in a child's home. — William Temple

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. — William Temple

Science has its being in a perpetual mental restlessness. — William Temple

Little things are little things; but faithfulness in little things is a very great thing. — William Temple

The first glass is for myself, the second for my friends, the third for good humor, and the forth for my enemies. — William Temple

It is a great mistake to think that God is chiefly concerned with our being religious. — William Temple

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. — William Temple

The greatest pleasure in life is love. — William Temple

You may keep your beauty and your health, unless you destroy them yourself, or discourage them to stay with you, by using them ill. — William Temple

Man's wisdom is his best friend; folly his worst enemy. — William Temple

People that trust wholly to other's charity, and without industry of their own, will always be poor. — William Temple

Some of the Fathers went so far as to esteem the love of music a sign of predestination, as a thing divine, and reserved for the felicities of heaven itself. — William Temple

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. — William Temple

If your prayer is selfish, the answer will be something that will rebuke your selfishness. You may not recognize it as having come at all, but it is sure to be there. — William Temple

I prefer a God who once and for all impressed his will upon creation, to one who continually busied about modifying what he had already done. — William Temple

True worship is when a person, through their person, attains intimacy and friendship with God. — William Temple

Christianity founds hospitals and atheists are cured in them, never knowing they owe their cure to Christ. — William Temple

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? — William Temple

I shall conclude with a saying of Alponsus, surnamed the Wise, King of Aragon - that among so many things as are by men possessed or pursued in the course of their lives, all the rest are baubles, besides old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to converse with, and old books to read! — William Temple

Art is the effort to appreciate and express the God who is its Beauty. — 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. — William Temple

Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they passed. — William Temple

Learning passes for wisdom among those who want both. — William Temple

When I pray, coincidences happen, and when I don't, they don't. — William Temple

The only way for a rich man to be healthy is by exercise and abstinence, to live as if he were poor. — William Temple

There is no structural organization of society which can bring about the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth since all systems can be perverted by the selfishness of man. The Malvern Manifesto: Drawn up by a Conference of the Province of York, January 10, 1941; signed for the Conference by Temple, then Archbishop of York . — William Temple

No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else. — William Temple

The first ingredient in conversation is truth, the next good sense, the third good humor, and the fourth wit. — William Temple

We shall say without hesitation that the atheist who is moved by love is moved by the Spirit of God; an atheist who lives by love is saved by his faith in the God whose existence (under that name) he denies. — William Temple

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. — William Temple