William Inge

“The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born.”

“I think middle-age is the best time, if we can escape the fatty degeneration of the conscience which often sets in at about fifty.”

“The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values.”

“The happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except that they are so.”

“To marry is to get a binocular view of life.”

“Every institution not only carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution, but prepares the way for its most hated rival.”

“Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.”

“Oh, yes. I'm terribly smart. Wouldn't it have been nice... to be intelligent?”

“I have no fear that the candle lighted in Palestine years ago will ever be put out.”

“Faith is an act of rational choice, which determines us to act as if certain things were true, and in the confident expectation that they will prove to be true.”

“I been talkin' with my buddy, and he thinks I'm virgin enough fer the two of us.”

“True faith is belief in the reality of absolute values.”

“What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.”

“The object of studying philosophy is to know one's own mind, not other people's.”

“Public opinion, a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to be the average person.”

“Bereavement is the sharpest challenge to our trust in God; if faith can overcome this, there is no mountain which it cannot remove.”

“Love remembered and consecrated by grief belongs, more clearly than the happy intercourse of friends, to the eternal world; it has proved itself stronger than death.”

“Bereavement is the deepest initiation into the mysteries of human life, an initiation more searching and profound than even happy love.”

“Action is the normal completion of the act of will which begins as prayer. That action is not always external, but it is always some kind of effective energy.”

“A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours.”