Top 100 T.H. White Quotes
#1. Arthur was not one of those interesting characters whose subtle motives can be dissected. He was only a simple and affectionate man, because Merlyn had believed that love and simplicity were worth having.
T.H. White
#2. The bravest people are the ones who don't mind looking like cowards.
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#3. Yes, that is the equality of man. Slaughter anybody who is better than you are, and then we shall be equal soon enough. All equally dead.
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#4. The author says people are guilty of wrecking the present because the future was bound to be a wreck.
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#5. It was at the outskirts of the world that the Old Things accumulated, like driftwood round the edges of the sea. ("The Troll")
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#6. He began to see why Merlyn had always clowned on purpose. It had been a means of helping people to learn in a happy way.
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#7. In going to sleep he had learned to vanquish light, and now the light could not rewake him.
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#8. One more try,' he asked, 'We are not quite done.' 'What is the use of trying?' 'It is a thing which people do.
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#9. How can you have boundaries if you fly? Those ants of yours - and the humans too - would have to stop fighting in the end, if they took to the air." "I like fighting," said the Wart. "It is knightly." "Because you're a baby.
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#10. If people reach perfection they vanish, you know.
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#11. Do you think that they, with their Battles, Famine, Black Death and Serfdom, were less enlightened than we are, with our Wars, Blockade, Influenza, and Conscription.
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#12. The word "feral" has a kind of magic potency which allied itself to two other words, "ferocious" and "free." To revert to a feral state!
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#13. The Victorians had not been anxious to go away for the weekend. The Edwardians, on the contrary, were nomadic.
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#14. Wherever they went and wherever they slept, the east wind whistled in the reeds, and the geese went over high in the starlight, honking at the stars.
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#15. If God is supposed to be merciful,' [Arthur] retorted, 'I don't see why He shouldn't allow people to stumble into heaven, just as well as climb there
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#16. Ought to be havin' a first-rate eddication, at their age. When I was their age I was doin' all this Latin and stuff
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#17. War is like a fire. One man may start it, but it will spread all over. It is not about one thing in particular.
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#18. Nobody can be too careful about their habits of speech.
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#19. After several minutes [Wart] said, "Is one allowed to speak as a human being, or does the thing about being seen and not heard have to apply?
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#20. He could do what all men wanted to, that is, fly
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#21. You have become the king of a domain in which the popular agitators hate each other for racial reasons, while the nobility fight each other for fun, and neither the racial maniac nor the overlord stops to consider the lot of the common soldier, who is the one person that gets hurt.
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#23. The poor fellow had never been cut out to be a villain.
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#24. It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible.
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#25. Grown-ups have developed an unpleasant habit of comforting themselves for their degradation by pretending that children are childish.
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#26. God is love, the bishops tell.
Yes, I know, But love is hell.
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#27. Queen Morgause," said Gwenever thoughtfully, "must have been a strange person.
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#28. The best thing for being sad ... is to learn something.
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#29. If it takes a million years for a fish to become a reptile, has Man, in our few hundred, altered out of recognition?
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#30. Wart draggled off to the tower room, where Merlyn was busy knitting himself a woollen night-cap for the winter. "I cast off two together at every other line," said the magician, "but for some reason it seems to end too sharply. Like an onion. It is the turning of the heel that does one, every time.
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#31. If there is one thing I can't stand, it is stupidity. I always say that stupidity is the Sin against the Holy Ghost.
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#32. when a moral sense begins to rot it is worse than when you had none.
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#33. She hardly ever thought of him. He had worn a place for himself in some corner of her heart, as a sea shell, always boring against the rock, might do. The making of the place had been her pain. But now the shell was safely in the rock. It was lodged, and ground no longer.
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#34. At this the Wart's eyes grew rounder and rounder, until they were about as big as the owl's who was sitting on his shoulder, and his face got redder and redder, and a breath seemed to gather itself beneath his heart.
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#35. a king can only work with his best tools.
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#36. Thank God for the aged And for age itself, and illness and the grave. When we are old and ill, and particularly in the coffin, It is no trouble to behave.
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#37. Believe me, the so-called primitive races who worshipped animals as gods were not so daft as people choose to pretend. At least they were humble. Why should not God have come to the earth as an earth-worm? There are a great many more worms than men, and they do a great deal more good.
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#38. Long ago, when I had my Merlyn to help, he tried to teach me to think. He knew he would have to leave in the end, so he forced me to think for myself. Don't ever let anybody teach you to think, Lance: it is the curse of the world.
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#39. He was neither clever nor sensitive, but he was loyal
stubbornly sometimes, and even annoyingly and stupidly so in later life.
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#40. Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance.
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#41. It was a grey September day, with the blue and copper butterflies flitting in the after-grass, the partridges calling like crickets, the blackberries colouring, and the hazel nuts still nursing their tasteless little kernels in the cradles of cotton wool.
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#42. Elaine had done the ungraceful thing as usual. Guenever, in similar circumstances, would have been sure to grow pale and interesting - but Elaine had only grown plump.
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#43. We have had a good time while we were young, but it is in the nature of Time to fly.
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#44. made of stone. It had no windows and only one door, through which you had to crawl.
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#45. Those who lived by the sword were forced to die by it.
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#46. I know hardly anything about Galahad except that everybody dislikes him."
"Dislikes him?"
"They complain about him being inhuman."
Lancelot considered his cup.
"He is inhuman," he said at last. "But why should he be human? Are angels supposed to be human?
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#48. I suppose one has to be desperate, to be a successful writer. One has to reach a rock-bottom at which one can afford to let everything go hang. One has got to damn the public, chance one's living, say what one thinks, and be oneself. Then something may come out.
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#49. Wrongs have to be redressed by reason, not by force.
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#50. It was called a tribute before a battle and a ransom afterwards.
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#51. It seems, in tragedy, that innocence is not enough.
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#52. Might does not make right! Right makes right!
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#53. I will tell you something else, King, which may be a surprise for you. It will not happen for hundreds of years, but both of us are to come back.
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#54. Mordred and Agravaine thought Arthur hypocritical - as all decent men must be, if you assume that decency can't exist.
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#55. But they woke him with words, their cruel bright weapons.
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#56. People commit suicide through weakness, not through strength.
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#57. All forms of collectivism are mistaken, according to the human skull.
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#58. Even his conversation was, as it were, a spoken part.
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#59. It happened like this in the world. Old things lost their grip and dropped away; not always because they were bad things, but sometimes because the new things were more bad, and stronger.
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#60. He may even have felt that God needed him more than Guenever did.
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#61. He felt in his heart cruelty and cowardice, the things which made him brave and kind.
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#62. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you.
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#63. But his heart had been made as a match for Elaine's, and now it was unable to bear the burden which hers had been forced to lay down.
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#64. Wars are never fought for one reason," he said. "They are fought for dozens of reasons, in a muddle.
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#65. I think I ought to have some eddication,"said the Wart, "I can't think of anything to do.
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#66. The increasingly cynical court thought Arthur, hypocritical, as all decent men must be if you assume decency cannot exist.
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#67. Hic jacet Arthurus Rex quandam Rexque futurus - the once and future king.
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#68. Any one war seems rooted in its antecedents.
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#69. He had conquered murder only to be faced with war. There were no laws for that.
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#70. I can imagine nothing more terrifying than an Eternity filled with men who were all the same. The only thing which has made life bearable ... has been the diversity of creatures on the surface of the globe.
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#71. I don't think things ought to be done because you are able to do them. I think they should be done because you ought to do them.
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#72. In the course of a long experience of the human race, I have learned that you can never make them understand anything, unless you rub it in.
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#73. Unfortunately we have tried to establish Right by Might, and you just can't do that
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#74. It is only the people who are lacking, or bad, or inferior, who have to be good at things.
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#75. People are dupes, and wicked too. That is what makes it interesting to get them better.
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#76. The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment.
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#77. A lot of brainless unicorns swaggering about and calling themselves educated just because they can push each other off a horse with a bit of a stick! It makes me tired.
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#78. The miracle was that he had been allowed to do a miracle. And ever, says Mallory, Sir Lancelot wept, as he had been a child that had been beaten.
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#79. The destiny of man is an individualistic destiny.
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#80. So Merlyn sent you to me," said the badger, "to finish your education. Well, I can only teach you two things
to dig, and love your home. These are the true end of philosophy.
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#81. It is the bad people who need to have principles to restrain them.
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#82. Perhaps we all give the best of our hearts uncritically
to those who hardly think about us in return.
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#83. For in those days love was ruled by a different convention to ours. In those days it was chivalrous, adult, long, religious, almost platonic. It was not a matter about which you could make accusations lightly. It was not, as we take it to be nowadays, begun and ended in a long week-end.
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#84. Thy sorrow will come from thine own mouth.
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#85. The destiny of all species is extinction as such, fortunately for them.
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#86. The eyes, circled by this sad and beautiful darkness, were so sorrowful, lonely, gentle and nobly tragic, that they killed all other emotion except love.
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#87. They made me see that the world was beautiful if you were beautiful, and that you couldn't get unless you gave. And you had to give without wanting to get.
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#88. My trouble is that my intelligence is materialistic, agnostic, pessimistic and solitary, while my heart is incurably tender, romantic, loving and gregarious.
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#89. He knew suddenly that nobody, living upon the remotest, most barren crag in the ocean, could complain of a dull landscape so long as he would lift his eyes. In the sky there was a new landscape every minute, in every pool of the sea rocks, a new world.
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#90. The Destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as a collection of monkeys throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees.
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#91. There were thousands of brown books in leather bindings, some chained to the book-shelves and others propped against each other as if they had had too much to drink and did not really trust themselves. These gave out a smell of must and solid brownness which was most secure.
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#92. People will do the basest things on account of their so-called honor.
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#93. Gawaine and Gareth took turns with the fat ass, one of them whacking it while the other rode bareback.
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#94. When Other blood spurts from the knife, Then everything is fine.
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#95. Yes Wart' said Merlyn 'Or rather, as I should say (or is it have I said?), Yes, King Arthur
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#96. Middle-aged people can balance between believing in God and breaking all the commandments without difficulty.
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#97. The only way I can keep clear of force is by justice. Far from being willing to execute his enemies, a real king must be willing to execute his friends.
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#98. When shall I be dead and rid Of all the wrong my father did? How long, how long 'till spade and hearse Put to sleep my mother's curse?
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#99. [Kay] was not at all an unpleasant person really, but clever, quick, proud, passionate and ambitious. He was one of those people who would be neither a follower nor a leader, but
only an aspiring heart, impatient in the failing body which imprisoned it.
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#100. Kay was older and bigger than the Wart, so that he was bound to win in the end, but he was more nervous and imaginative. He could imagine the effect of each blow that was aimed at him, and this weakened his defense. Wart was only an infuriated hurricane.
T.H. White
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