William Temple Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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 at all.

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

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.

The greatest medicine is a true friend.

It is sometimes said that conduct is supremely important and worship helps it. The truth is that worship is supremely important and conduct tests it

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

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.

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.

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.

A man's wisdom is his best friend; folly, his worst enemy.

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.

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

Science has its being in a perpetual mental restlessness.

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.

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

Learning passes for wisdom among those who want both.

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.