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All William Temple Quotes
The first ingredient in conversation is truth, the next good sense, the third good humor, and the fourth wit.
William Temple
55% of people like this quote
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
55% of people like this quote
No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.
William Temple
55% of people like this quote
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
54% of people like this quote
The first glass is for myself, the second for my friends, the third for good humor, and the forth for my enemies.
William Temple
54% of people like this quote
Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they passed.
William Temple
54% of people like this quote
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
53% of people like this quote
Man's wisdom is his best friend; folly his worst enemy.
William Temple
53% of people like this quote
When I pray, coincidences happen, and when I don't, they don't.
William Temple
53% of people like this quote
The only way for a rich man to be healthy is by exercise and abstinence, to live as if he were poor.
William Temple
52% of people like this quote
The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child's home.
William Temple
50% of people like this quote
Our present time is indeed a criticizing and critical time, hovering between the wish, and the inability to believe. Our complaints are like arrows shot up into the air at no target: and with no purpose they only fall back upon our own heads and destroy ourselves.
William Temple
50% of people like this quote
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
49% of people like this quote
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
47% of people like this quote
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
45% of people like this quote
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