John Galsworthy Quotes

Religion was nearly dead because there was no longer real belief in future life; but something was struggling to take its place - service - social service - the ants creed, the bees creed.

There are two irreconcilable ideas of God. There's the Unknowable Creative Principle---one believes in That. And there's the Sum of altruism in man---naturally one believes in That...The sublime poem of the Christ life was man's attempt to join those two irreconcilable conceptions of God. And since the Sum of human altruism was as much a part of the Unknowable Creative Principle as anything else in Nature and the Universe, a worse link might have been chosen after all! Funny---how one went through life without seeing it in that sort of way!

We are not living in a private world of our own. Everything we say and do and think has its effect on everything around us.

From behind a wooden crate we saw a long black-muzzled nose poking round at us. We took him out-soft, wobbly, tearful; set him down on his four, as yet not quite simultaneous legs, and regarded him. He wandered a little round our legs, neither wagging his tail nor licking at our hands; then he looked up, and my companion said: "He's an angel!"

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!

The young man who, at the end of September, 1924, dismounted from a taxicab in South Square, Westminster, was so unobtrusively American that his driver had some hesitation in asking for double his fare. The young man had no hesitation in refusing it.

The bicycle ... has been responsible for more movement in manners and morals than anything since Charles the Second. Under its influence, wholly or in part, have blossomed weekends, strong nerves, strong legs, strong language ... equality of sex, good digestion and professional occupation - in four words, the emanicipation of women.

Come! Let us lay a lance in rest,
And tilt at windmills under a wild sky!
For who would live so petty and unblest
That dare not tilt at something ere he die;
Rather than, screened by safe majority,
Preserve his little life to little end,
And never raise a rebel cry!

Early morning does not mince words.

I drink the wine of aspiration and the drug of illusion. Thus I am never dull.

The fascination of [Joseph Conrad's] writing lies in a singular blending of reality with romance – he paints a world of strange skies and seas, rivers, forests, men, stranger harbours and ships, all, to our tamed understanding, touched a little by the marvelous. Beyond all modern writers he had lived romance; lived it for many years with a full unconscious pulse, the zest of a young man loving adventure, and before ever he thought to become a writer. How many talents among us are spoiled by having no store of experience and feeling, unconsciously amassed, to feed on! How many writers, without cream inside the churn, are turning out butter!

Beginnings are always messy.

Love could never come to full fruition till it was destroyed.

She stood for a moment looking up at the stars, so far, so many, bright and cold. And with a faint smile she thought: 'I wonder which is my lucky star!

She stood and tried hard not to believe in God. It seemed mean and petty to have more belief in God when things were going well than when they were instinct with tragedy; just as it seemed mean and petty to pray to God when you wanted something badly, and not pray when you didn't. But after all God was Eternal Mind that you couldn't understand; God was not a loving Father that you could. The less she thought about all that the better.

He won't be happy till he gets it," said Michael, at last: "The only thing is, you see, he doesn't know what IT is.

He might wish and wish and never get it - the beauty and the loving in the world!

An epoch which had gilded individual liberty so that if a man had money he was free in law and fact, and if he had not money he was free in law and not in fact. An era which had canonized hypocrisy, so that to seem to be respectable was to be.

If you do not think about the future, you cannot have one.

Only love makes fruitful the soul.

In choosing, moreover, for his father an amiable man of fifty-two, who had already lost an only son, and for his mother a woman of thirty-eight, whose first and only child he was, little Jon had done well and wisely. What had saved him from becoming a cross between a lap dog and a little prig, had been his father's adoration of his mother, for even little Jon could see that she was not merely just his mother, and that he played second fiddle to her in his father's heart: What he played in his mother's heart he knew not yet.

The Forsytes were resentful of something, not individually, but as a family; this resentment expressed itself in an added perfection of raiment, an exuberance of family cordiality, an exaggeration of family importance, and the sniff. Danger so indispensable in bringing out the fundamental quality of any society, group, or individual was what the Forsytes scented; the premonition of danger put a burnish on their armour. For the first time, as a family, they appeared to have an instinct of being in contact, with some strange and unsafe thing.

Admiration of beauty and longing for possession are not love.

Looking back on the long-stretched-out body of one's work, it is interesting to mark the endless duel fought within a man between the emotional and critical sides of his nature, first one, then the other, getting the upper hand, and too seldom fusing till the result has the mellowness of full achievement. One can even tell the nature of one's readers, by their preference for the work which reveals more of this side than of that.

Justice is a machine that, when someone has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself. - John Galsworthy, Justice [1910], act II

We are a breed of spoilers!' thought Jolyon, 'close and greedy; the bloom of life is not safe with us. Let her come to me as she will, when she will, not at all if she will not. Let me be just her stand-by, her perching-place; never-never her cage!

Not the least hard thing to bear when they go from us, these quiet friends, is that they carry away with them so many years of our own lives.

Politics are popularly supposed to govern the direction, and statesmen to be the guardian angels, of Civilization. It seems to me that they have little or no power over its growth. They are of it, and move with it. Their concern is rather with the body than with the mind or soul of a nation. One needs not to be an engineer to know that to pull a man up a wall one must be higher than he; that to raise general taste one must have better taste than that of those whose taste he is raising.

He went up to the globe and gave it a spin. It emitted a faint creak and moved about one inch, bringing into his purview a daddy long legs which had died on it in latitude 44.

Light-heartedness always made Soames suspicious - there was generally some reason for it.

Youth, like a flame, burned ever in his breast, and to youth he turned, to the round little limbs, so reckless, that wanted care, to the small round faces so unreasonably solemn or bright, to the treble tongues, and the shrill, chuckling laughter, to the insistent tugging hands, and the feel of small bodies against his legs, to all that was young and young, and once more young.

The French cook; we open tins.

Humanism is the creed of those who believe that in the circle of enwrapping mystery, men's fates are in their own hands - a faith that for modern man is becoming the only possible faith.

His natural taciturnity was in his favour; nothing could be more calculated to give people, especially people with property (Soames had no other clients), the impression that he was a safe man. And he was safe. [ ... ] How could he fall, when his soul abhorred circumstances which render a fall possible - a man cannot fall off the floor!

Mechanism! Everywhere
mechanism! Devices for getting away from life so complete that there seemed no life to get away from.

The value of a sentiment is the amount of sacrifice you are prepared to make for it.

Youth to youth, like the dragon-flies chasing each other, and love like the sun warming them through and through.

James and the other eight children of 'Superior Dosset,' of whom there are still five alive, may be said to have represented Victorian England, with its principles of trade and individualism at five per cent, and your money back - if you know what that means. At all events they've turned thirty thousand pounds into a cool million between them in the course of their long lives. ( ... ) Their day is passing, and their type, not altogether for the advantage of the country. They were pedestrian, but they too were sound.

Wealth is a means to an end, not the end itself. As a synonym for health and happiness, it has had a fair trial and failed dismally.

So this wonderful city
Has only dead ashes for me.

Men are in fact, quite unable to control their own inventions; they at best develop adaptability to the new conditions those inventions create.

I think the greatest thing in the world is to believe in people.

Honesty of thought and speech and written word is a jewel, and they who curb prejudice and seek honorably to know and speak the truth are the only builders of a better life.

Memory heaps dead leaves on corpse-like deeds, from under which they do but vaguely offend the sense.

We are all familiar with the argument: Make war dreadful enough, and there will be no war. And we none of us believe it.

There are houses whose souls have passed into the limbo of Time, leaving their bodies in the limbo of London. Such was not quite the condition of "Timothy's" on the Bayswater Road, for Timothy's soul still had one foot in Timothy Forsyte's body, and Smither kept the atmosphere unchanging, of camphor and port wine and house whose windows are only opened to air it twice a day.

It is by muteness that a dog becomes for one so utterly beyond value; with him one is at peace, where words play no torturing tricks.Those are the moments that I think are precious to a dog-when, with his adoring soul coming through his eyes, he feels that you are really thinking of him.

A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.

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.

Public opinion's always in advance of the law.

I am still under the impression that there is nothing alive quite so beautiful as a thoroughbred horse.

It's always worth while before you do anything to consider whether it's going to hurt another person more than is absolutely necessary.

Dawn has power to fertilise the most matter-of-fact vision.

Curious how he jibbed away from sight of his wife and child!
One would have thought he must have rushed up at the first moment. On the contrary, he had a sort of physical shrinking from it - fastidious possessor that he was. He was afraid of what Annette was thinking of him, author of her agonies, afraid of the look of the baby, afraid of showing his disappointment with the present and - the future.

Only love makes fruitful the soul. The sense of form that both had in such high degree prevented much demonstration; but to be with him, do things for him, to admire, and credit him with perfection; and, since she could not exactly wear the same clothes or speak in the same clipped, quiet, decisive voice, to dislike the clothes and voices of other men - all this was precious to her beyond everything.

Wishes father thought, but they don't breed evidence.

Slang is vigorous and apt. Probably most of our vital words were once slang.

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.

No one has told Jon's wife that he and I were once in love, I suppose?"
Holly shook her head.
"I'd rather they didn't, then."
"of course not, my dear. I'll see to it. The child's nice, I think."
"Nice," said Fleur, "but not important.

Art is that imaginative expression of human energy, which, through technical concretion of feeling and perception, tends to reconcile the individual with the universal, by exciting in him impersonal emotion. And the greatest Art is that which excites the greatest impersonal emotion in an hypothetical perfect human being.

Impersonal emotion! And what - I thought - do I mean by that? Surely I mean: That is not Art, which, while I am contemplating it, inspires me with any active or direct impulse; that is Art, when, for however brief a moment, it replaces within me interest in myself by interest in itself. For, let me suppose myself in the presence of a carved marble bath. If my thoughts be: 'What could I buy that for?' Impulse of acquisition; or: 'From what quarry did it come?' Impulse of inquiry; or: 'Which would be the right end for my head?' Mixed impulse of inquiry and acquisition - I am at that moment insensible to it as a work of Art. But, if I stand before it vibrating at sight of its colour and forms, if ever so little and for ever so short a time, unhaunted by any definite practical thought or impulse - to that extent and for that moment it has stolen me away out of myself and put itself there instead; has linked me to the universal by making me forget the individual in me. And for that moment, and only while that moment lasts, it is to me a work of Art. The word 'impersonal,' then, is but used in this my definition to signify momentary forgetfulness of one'

Love! Beyond meaure - beyond death - it nearly kills. But one wouldn't have been without it.

That tendency ... to lie awake between the hours of two and four, when the chrysalis of faint misgiving becomes so readily the butterfly of panic.

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.

To every man of great age - to Sir Wlater Bentham himself - the idea of suicide has once at least been present in the ante-room of his soul; on the threshold, waiting to enter, held out from the inmost chamber by some chance reality, some vague fear, some painful hope.
The Man of Property, p. 363

Summer - summer - summer! The soundless footsteps on the grass!