William Temple was a bishop in the Church of England. He served as Bishop of Manchester, Archbishop of York and Archbishop of Canterbury.
Source: Wikipedia (via CC-BY-SA license) • READ: Works by William Temple
A man’s wisdom is his best friend; folly his worst enemy.
—William Temple
Topics: Wisdom
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.
—William Temple
In conversation, humor is more than wit, and easiness more than knowledge. Few desire to learn, or think they need it. — All desire to be pleased, or at least to be easy.
—William Temple
Topics: Conversation
By luxury we condemn ourselves to greater torments than have yet been invented by anger or revenge, or inflicted by the greatest tyrants upon the orst of men.
—William Temple
Topics: Luxury
Learning passes for wisdom among those who want both.
—William Temple
Topics: Learning
The problem of evil… Why does God permit it? Or, if God is omnipotent, in which case permission and creation are the same, why did God create it?
—William Temple
Topics: Evil
Books and proverbs receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they have passed.
—William Temple
Topics: Proverbs, Reading, Books
Leisure and solitude are the best effect of riches, because mother of thought. Both are avoided by most rich men, who seek company and business; which are signs of their being weary of themselves.
—William Temple
Topics: Leisure, Solitude, Wealth
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.
—William Temple
Topics: Aging, Age
Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.
—William Temple
Topics: Books, Reading
A man that only translates, shall never be a poet: nor a painter, that only copies; nor a swimmer, that swims always with bladders; so people that trust wholly to others’ charity, and without industry of their own, will always be poor.
—William Temple
Topics: Self-reliance, Charity
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.
—William Temple
I have long thought, that the different abilities of men, which we call wisdom or prudence for the conduct of public affairs or private life, grow directly out of that little grain of good sense which they bring with them into the world; and that the defect of it in men comes from some want in their conception or birth.
—William Temple
Health is the soul that animates all the enjoyments of life, which fade and are tasteless without it.
—William Temple
Topics: Health
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.
—William Temple
Topics: Selfishness, Prayer
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.
—William Temple
All courageous animals are carnivorous, and greater courage is to be expected in a people whose food is strong and hearty, than in the half-starved of other countries.
—William Temple
Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.
—William Temple
Topics: Life and Living
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