William Ralph Inge
Sir William Ralph Inge was educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge. After taking a double first in Classics, he became a tutor at Hertford College, Oxford, and was made a deacon in the Church of England in 1888. After a time as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, Inge was elected Dean of St. Paul's cathedral in 1911 by Asquith, a position he held until 1934.
During his life, Inge was President of the Aristotelian society, a columnist for the Evening Standard, a fellow of the British Academy, and a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery. He received honorary doctorates from Oxford, Aberdeen, Durham, Sheffield, Edinburgh, and St. Andrews. Inge received honorary fellowships from King's and Jesus Colleges, Cambridge, and Hertford College, Oxford.
“what is originality ? undetected plagiarism!”
“Events in the past maybe roughly divided into those which and probably never happened and those which do not matter.”
“A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and a common hatred of its neighbors.”
“It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion.”
“Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next. ”
“The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born.”
“The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.”
“It is quite natural and inevitable that, if we spend sixteen hours daily of our waking lives in thinking about the affairs of the world and five minutes in thinking about God and our souls, this world will seem two hundred times more real to us than God.”
“Many people believe that they are attracted by God, or by Nature, when they are only repelled by man.”
“Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due.”
“We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.”