|
Justice is a machine that, when someone has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, Justice: A Tragedy in Four Acts
Only love makes fruitful the soul.
Love is no hot-house flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine; sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance within the hedge of our gardens, we call a flower; and when it blooms outside we call a weed; but, flower or weed, whose scent and colour are always wild!
JOHN GALSWORTHY, The Forsyte Saga
Life calls the tune, we dance.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, Five Tales
Art is the one form of human energy in the whole world, which really works for union, and destroys the barriers between man and man. It is the continual, unconscious replacement, however fleeting, of oneself by another; the real cement of human life; the everlasting refreshment and renewal. For, what is grievous, dompting, grim, about our lives is that we are shut up within ourselves, with an itch to get outside ourselves. And to be stolen away from ourselves by Art is a momentary relaxation from that itching, a minute's profound, and as it were secret, enfranchisement.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, Vague Thoughts on Art
When Man evolved Pity, he did a queer thing — deprived himself of the power of living life as it is without wishing it to become something different.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, letter to Thomas Hardy, Mar. 27, 1910
If you do not think about the future, you cannot have one.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, Swan Song
Summer — summer — summer! The soundless footsteps on the grass!
JOHN GALSWORTHY, Indian Summer of a Forsyte
The world's a fine place for those who go out to take it; there's lots of unknown stuff' in it yet. I'll fill your lap, my pretty, so full of treasures that you shan't know yourself. A man wasn't meant to sit at home.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, A Man of Devon
There are moments when Nature reveals the passion hidden beneath the careless calm of her ordinary moods--violent spring flashing white on almond-blossom through the purple clouds; a snowy, moonlit peak, with its single star, soaring up to the passionate blue; or against the flames of sunset, an old yew-tree standing dark guardian of some fiery secret.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, The Forsyte Saga
The value of a sentiment is the amount of sacrifice you are prepared to make for it.
A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, Maid in Waiting
Early morning does not mince words.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, The Forsyte Saga
It is an age of stir and change, a season of new wine and old bottles. Yet, assuredly, in spite of breakages and waste, a wine worth the drinking is all the time being made.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, Vague Thoughts on Art
One's eyes are what one is, one's mouth what one becomes.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, Flowering Wilderness
May night had fallen soft and warm, enwrapping with its grape-bloom colour and its scents the billion caprices, intrigues, passions, longings, and regrets of men and women.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, The Forsyte Saga
It isn't enough to love people because they're good to you, or because in some way or other you're going to get something by it. We have to love because we love loving.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, A Bit O' Love
Beauty means this to one person, perhaps, and that to another. And yet when any one of us has seen or heard or read that which to him is beautiful, he has known an emotion which is in every case the same in kind, if not in degree; an emotion precious and uplifting. A choirboy's voice, a ship in sail, an opening flower, a town at night, the song of the blackbird, a lovely poem, leaf shadows, a child's grace, the starry skies, a cathedral, apple trees in spring, a thorough-bred horse, sheep-bells on a hill, a rippling stream, a butterfly, the crescent moon -- the thousand sights or sounds or words that evoke in us the thought of beauty -- these are the drops of rain that keep the human spirit from death by drought. They are a stealing and a silent refreshment that we perhaps do not think about but which goes on all the time....It would surprise any of us if we realized how much store we unconsciously set by beauty, and how little savour there would be left in life if it were withdrawn. It is the smile on the earth's face, open to all, and needs but the eyes to see, the mood to understand.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, Candelabra
Men are in fact, quite unable to control their own inventions; they at best develop adaptability to the new conditions those inventions create
JOHN GALSWORTHY, The Forsyte Saga
Only out of stir and change is born new salvation. To deny that is to deny belief in man, to turn our backs on courage!
JOHN GALSWORTHY, Vague Thoughts on Art
Love of beauty is really only the sex instinct, which nothing but complete union satisfies.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, Saint's Progress
Dawn has power to fertilise the most matter-of-fact vision.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, The Forsyte Saga
There's just one rule for politicians all over the world: Don't say in Power what you say in Opposition; if you do, you only have to carry out what the other fellows have found impossible.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, Maid in Waiting
He is but a poor philosopher who holds a view so narrow as to exclude forms not to his personal taste.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, Vague Thoughts on Art
Society is built on marriage ... marriage and its consequences.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, The Forsyte Saga
Where Beauty was, nothing ever ran quite straight, which, no doubt, was why so many people looked on it as immoral.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, The Forsyte Saga
It was such a spring day as breathes into a man an ineffable yearning, a painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand motionless, looking at the leaves or grass, and fling out his arms to embrace he knows not what.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, The Forsyte Saga
Love could never come to full fruition till it was destroyed.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, Fraternity
|
