Top 79 Quotes About John Galsworthy
#1. Essential characteristics of a gentleman: The will to put himself in the place of others; the horror of forcing others into positions from which he would himself recoil; and the power to do what seems to him to be right without considering what others may say or think.
John Galsworthy
#2. 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.
John Galsworthy
#3. Mechanism! Everywhere
mechanism! Devices for getting away from life so complete that there seemed no life to get away from.
John Galsworthy
#5. 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.
John Galsworthy
#6. Society is built on marriage ... marriage and its consequences.
John Galsworthy
#7. We are all familiar with the argument: Make war dreadful enough, and there will be no war. And we none of us believe it.
John Galsworthy
#8. Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.
John Galsworthy
#9. 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.
John Galsworthy
#10. 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.
John Galsworthy
#11. Swithin! And the fellow had gone and died, last November, at the age of seventy-nine, renewing the doubt whether Forsytes could live for ever, which had first arisen when Aunt Ann passed away.
John Galsworthy
#12. Love of beauty is really only the sex instinct, which nothing but complete union satisfies.
John Galsworthy
#13. Justice is a machine that, when someone has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself. - John Galsworthy, Justice [1910], act II
John Galsworthy
#15. If you do not think about the future, you cannot have one.
John Galsworthy
#16. I think the greatest thing in the world is to believe in people.
John Galsworthy
#17. By the cigars they smoke, and the composers they love, ye shall know the texture of men's souls.
John Galsworthy
#18. 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.
John Galsworthy
#19. 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
#20. He was afflicted by the thought that where Beauty was, nothing ever ran quite straight, which no doubt, was why so many people looked on it as immoral.
John Galsworthy
#21. The law is what it is-a majestic edifice, sheltering all of us, each stone of which rests on another.
John Galsworthy
#23. 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.
John Galsworthy
#24. The value of a sentiment is the amount of sacrifice you are prepared to make for it.
John Galsworthy
#25. 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.
John Galsworthy
#26. 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!
John Galsworthy
#27. I am still under the impression that there is nothing alive quite so beautiful as a thoroughbred horse.
John Galsworthy
#28. 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!
John Galsworthy
#29. 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.
John Galsworthy
#30. Once admit that we have the right to inflict unnecessary suffering and you destroy the very basis of human society.
John Galsworthy
#32. Summer - summer - summer! The soundless footsteps on the grass!
John Galsworthy
#33. Slang is vigorous and apt. Probably most of our vital words were once slang.
John Galsworthy
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.
John Galsworthy
#37. And yet, in books were comfort and diversion; and they were wanted!
John Galsworthy
#38. How to save the old that's worth saving, whether in landscape, houses, manners, institutions, or human types, is one of our greatest problems, and the one that we bother least about.
John Galsworthy
#39. Really," said Winifred suddenly; "it almost seems like Fate. Only that's so old-fashioned.
John Galsworthy
#40. It's not life that counts but the fortitude you bring into it.
John Galsworthy
#41. It isnot good enough tospend time and ink indescribing the penultimate sensations and physical movements of people getting into a state of rut, we all know them so well.
John Galsworthy
#42. It's always worth while before you do anything to consider whether it's going to hurt another person more than is absolutely necessary.
John Galsworthy
#43. Justice is a machine which, when someone has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself.
John Galsworthy
#44. A man is the sum of his actions, of what he has done, of what he can do, Nothing else.
John Galsworthy
#45. One's eyes are what one is, one's mouth is what one becomes.
John Galsworthy
#46. 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.
John Galsworthy
#47. Dawn has power to fertilise the most matter-of-fact vision.
John Galsworthy
#48. Light-heartedness always made Soames suspicious - there was generally some reason for it.
John Galsworthy
#49. The biggest tragedy of life is the utter impossibility to change what you have done
John Galsworthy
#50. Dreaming is the poetry of Life, and we must be forgiven if we indulge in it a little.
John Galsworthy
#51. Memory heaps dead leaves on corpse-like deeds, from under which they do but vaguely offend the sense.
John Galsworthy
#52. 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.
John Galsworthy
#54. He might wish and wish and never get it - the beauty and the loving in the world!
John Galsworthy
#55. 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
#57. 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.
John Galsworthy
#58. 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.
John Galsworthy
#59. Love! Beyond meaure - beyond death - it nearly kills. But one wouldn't have been without it.
John Galsworthy
#61. 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.
John Galsworthy
#62. See what perils do environ those who meddle with hot iron.
John Galsworthy
#63. If you do not think about your future, you cannot have one.
John Galsworthy
#64. The talked-about is always the last to hear the talk ...
John Galsworthy
#65. 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
#66. There is 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
#71. 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
#72. Take modern courtships! They resulted in the same thing as under George the Second, but took longer to reach it, owing to the motor-cycle and the standing lunch.
John Galsworthy
#73. Youth to youth, like the dragon-flies chasing each other, and love like the sun warming them through and through.
John Galsworthy
#74. ...that secret hostility natural between brothers, the roots of which --little nursery rivalries--sometimes toughen and deepen as life goes on, and, all hidden, support a plant capable of producing in season the bitterest fruits.
John Galsworthy
#75. Love could never come to full fruition till it was destroyed.
John Galsworthy
#76. 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.
John Galsworthy
#78. I drink the wine of aspiration and the drug of illusion. Thus I am never dull.
John Galsworthy
#79. The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy.
John Galsworthy
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