William Temple Quotes
"The first glass is for myself, the second for my friends, the third for good humor, and the forth for my enemies."
- William Temple
(Related: Humor, Enemies, First, Friends)
"You may keep your beauty and your health, unless you destroy them yourself, or discourage them to stay with you, by using them ill."
- William Temple
(Related: Beauty, Health, May)
"The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child's home."
- William Temple
(Related: Home, Conversation)
"When I pray, coincidences happen, and when I don't, they don't."
- William Temple
"When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humored a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over."
- William Temple
(Related: Life, Care, Quiet)
"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
(Related: Man, Old)
"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
(Related: God, Creation, Evil)
"The only way for a rich man to be healthy is by exercise and abstinence, to live as if he were poor."
- William Temple
(Related: Abstinence, Exercise, Man, Poor)
"Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new."
- William Temple
(Related: Books, Old, Will)
"The first ingredient in conversation is truth, the next good sense, the third good humor, and the fourth wit."
- William Temple
(Related: Humor, Truth, Conversation, First, Sense, Wit)
"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
(Related: Company, Distrust, Man, Opinions, Rules, Talk, Value)
"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
(Related: Men, Authority, Custom, Man, Nothing)
"Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they passed."
- William Temple
(Related: Books, Value)
"I have always looked upon alchemy in natural philosophy to be like enthusiasm in divinity, and to have troubled the world much to the same purpose."
- William Temple
(Related: Enthusiasm, Purpose, Alchemy, Divinity, Philosophy, World)
"Man's wisdom is his best friend; folly his worst enemy."
- William Temple
(Related: Wisdom, Friend, Enemy, Folly, Man)
"No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else."
- William Temple