William Temple Quotes

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.

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 .

The greatest pleasure in life is love.

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.

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.

Religion is what you do with your solitude.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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