54 Quotes by William Temple

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.

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

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

The most influential of all educational factor is the conversation in a child’s home.

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.

Pharisees – men who lived in the strength of a fellowship that had behind it the greatest religious tradition in all the world, but who, because they trusted more to their tradition than to the God who inspired it, were unable to recognise the still further call of God when it came to them.

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!

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

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.