Top 100 T H White Quotes
#1. With solitude, however, fervently it is desired and embraced, comes loneliness. T. H White, the author, offered advice to those in sadness
learn something new.
Carolyn G. Heilbrun
#3. 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.
T.H. White
#4. 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.
T.H. White
#5. It is difficult to write about a real person.
T.H. White
#6. No, I'm not." "Yes, you are." "No, I'm not." "Yes, you are." "I said Pax Non." "You said Pax." "No, I didn't." "Yes, you did." "No, I didn't." "Yes, you did.
T.H. White
#8. Who said that?" asked Sir Grummore.
"But the sword said it, like I tell you."
"Talkative weapon," remarked Sir Grummore skeptically.
T.H. White
#9. All endeavours which are directed to a purely worldly end ... contain within themselves the germs of their own corruption.
T.H. White
#10. 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?
T.H. White
#11. Everything not forbidden is compulsory
T.H. White
#12. Those who lived by the sword were forced to die by it.
T.H. White
#13. Cavall came simply and gave his heart and soul.
T.H. White
#14. made of stone. It had no windows and only one door, through which you had to crawl.
T.H. White
#15. We have had a good time while we were young, but it is in the nature of Time to fly.
T.H. White
#16. 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.
T.H. White
#17. 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.
T.H. White
#18. Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance.
T.H. White
#19. He was neither clever nor sensitive, but he was loyal
stubbornly sometimes, and even annoyingly and stupidly so in later life.
T.H. White
#20. Sometimes things are more complicated than they seem. Sometimes what you see isn't so black and white.
Victoria H. Smith
#21. Black is beautiful .Black isn't power. Knowledge is power. You can be black as a crow or white as snow but if you don't know and you ain't got no dough, you can't go and that's for sho'.
Lewis H. Michaux
#22. 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.
T.H. White
#23. 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.
T.H. White
#24. 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.
T.H. White
#25. a king can only work with his best tools.
T.H. White
#26. The H-bomb rather favors small nations that doesn't as yet possess it; they feel slightly more free to jostle other nations, having discovered that a country can stick its tongue out quite far these days without provoking war, so horrible are war's consequences.
E.B. White
#27. 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.
T.H. White
#28. Mordred and Agravaine thought Arthur hypocritical - as all decent men must be, if you assume that decency can't exist.
T.H. White
#29. He felt in his heart cruelty and cowardice, the things which made him brave and kind.
T.H. White
#30. I can see that you spoke in ignorance, and I bitterly regret that I should have been so petty as to take offence where none was intended.
T.H. White
#31. He may even have felt that God needed him more than Guenever did.
T.H. White
#32. It is only people who are lacking, or bad, or inferior, who have to be good at things. You have always been full and perfect, so you had nothing to make up for.
T.H. White
#33. 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.
T.H. White
#34. Even his conversation was, as it were, a spoken part.
T.H. White
#35. The snow-haired Uncle Dap, so old as to be absolutely fabulous, was trying to jump over his walking-stick.
T.H. White
#36. All forms of collectivism are mistaken, according to the human skull.
T.H. White
#37. People commit suicide through weakness, not through strength.
T.H. White
#38. God save King Pendragon,
May his reign long drag on,
God save the King.
Send him most gorious,
Great and uproarious,
Horrible and hoarious,
God save our King.
T.H. White
#39. But they woke him with words, their cruel bright weapons.
T.H. White
#40. Dogs, like very small children, are quite mad.
T.H. White
#41. 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.
T.H. White
#42. He said, 'Good dog, Beaumont the valiant, sleep now, old friend Beaumont, good old dog.' Then Robin's falchion let Beaumont out of this world, to run free with Orion and roll among the stars.
T.H. White
#43. I would recommend a solo flight to all prospective suicides. It tends to make clear the issue of whether one enjoys being alive or not.
T.H. White
#44. I believe in white knights, but the only knight in this story is me. No one saved me. I've fallen so far that I can't even see the way out anymore. I'm at the bottom of Hell and I found you.
H.M. Ward
#45. Might does not make right! Right makes right!
T.H. White
#46. It seems, in tragedy, that innocence is not enough.
T.H. White
#47. It was called a tribute before a battle and a ransom afterwards.
T.H. White
#48. Is there anything more terrible than perpetual motion, than doing and doing and doing, without a reason, without a consciousness, without a change, without an end?
T.H. White
#49. Wrongs have to be redressed by reason, not by force.
T.H. White
#50. I see it, Jack. Your muse is back. The thing that gave you passion, tormented you, and haunted you is back. You're reeling in ecstasy and dread. It's something you want, but can't ever have. And the one that brings the pain is pure, white as snow ... and standing in front of you.
H.M. Ward
#51. You think education is something to be done when all else fails?
T.H. White
#52. Aviators live by hours, not by days.
T.H. White
#53. Everybody is always saying what a parfit, gentle knight I am, but it has nothing to do with me. It is Arthur's idea. It is what he has wished on all the younger generation, like Gareth, and now it is fashionable.
T.H. White
#54. True warfare is rarer in Nature than cannibalism.
T.H. White
#55. Nobody can be too careful about their habits of speech.
T.H. White
#56. War is like a fire. One man may start it, but it will spread all over. It is not about one thing in particular.
T.H. White
#57. Ought to be havin' a first-rate eddication, at their age. When I was their age I was doin' all this Latin and stuff
T.H. White
#58. 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
T.H. White
#59. 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.
T.H. White
#60. The Victorians had not been anxious to go away for the weekend. The Edwardians, on the contrary, were nomadic.
T.H. White
#61. Jenny, all my life I have wanted to do miracles. I have wanted to be holy. I suppose it was ambition or pride or some other unworthy thing. It was not enough for me to conquer the world
I wanted to conquer heaven too.
T.H. White
#62. Merlyn always said that sportsmanship was the curse of the world, and so it is.
T.H. White
#63. 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!
T.H. White
#64. 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.
T.H. White
#65. Who doth ambition shun And loves to lie in the sun, Seeking the food he eats And pleased with what he gets,
T.H. White
#66. If people reach perfection they vanish, you know.
T.H. White
#67. 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.
T.H. White
#68. One more try,' he asked, 'We are not quite done.' 'What is the use of trying?' 'It is a thing which people do.
T.H. White
#69. In going to sleep he had learned to vanquish light, and now the light could not rewake him.
T.H. White
#70. 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.
T.H. White
#71. It was at the outskirts of the world that the Old Things accumulated, like driftwood round the edges of the sea. ("The Troll")
T.H. White
#72. The author says people are guilty of wrecking the present because the future was bound to be a wreck.
T.H. White
#73. 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.
T.H. White
#74. You could not give up a human heart as you could give up drinking. The drink was yours, and you could give it up: but your lover's soul was not your own: it was not at your disposal; you had a duty towards it.
T.H. White
#75. The bravest people are the ones who don't mind looking like cowards.
T.H. White
#76. 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
#77. Plain white T-shirts do it for me every time. You can spend anything from £3 to £50 on a T-shirt, but I've bought some great ones from H&M, as well as shelling out on Duffer Of St George and a Polish label I discovered while filming 'Robin Hood' in Hungary called Scotch And Soda.
Jonas Armstrong
#78. when a moral sense begins to rot it is worse than when you had none.
T.H. White
#79. If there is one thing I can't stand, it is stupidity. I always say that stupidity is the Sin against the Holy Ghost.
T.H. White
#80. 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.
T.H. White
#81. If it takes a million years for a fish to become a reptile, has Man, in our few hundred, altered out of recognition?
T.H. White
#82. It is a pity that there are no big creatures to prey on humanity. If there were enough dragons and rocs, perhaps mankind would turn its might against them. Unfortunately man is preyed upon by microbes, which are too small to be appreciated.
T.H. White
#83. The fate of this man or that man was less than a drop, although it was a sparkling one, in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea.
T.H. White
#84. It is good to put your life in other people's hands.
T.H. White
#85. The best thing for being sad ... is to learn something.
T.H. White
#86. Queen Morgause," said Gwenever thoughtfully, "must have been a strange person.
T.H. White
#87. The race will find that capitalists and communists modify themselves so much during the ages that they end by being indistinguishable as democrats ...
T.H. White
#88. I don't think you can very well give people as presents: they might not like it.
T.H. White
#89. 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.
T.H. White
#90. We cannot build the future by avenging the past.
T.H. White
#91. God is love, the bishops tell.
Yes, I know, But love is hell.
T.H. White
#92. Their mother is Athene, the goddess of wisdom, and, although they are often ready to play the buffoon to amuse you, such conduct is the prerogative of the truly wise.
T.H. White
#93. Grown-ups have developed an unpleasant habit of comforting themselves for their degradation by pretending that children are childish.
T.H. White
#94. It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible.
T.H. White
#95. The poor fellow had never been cut out to be a villain.
T.H. White
#96. Now, in their love, which was stronger, there were the seeds of hatred and fear and confusion growing at the same time: for love can exist with hatred, each preying on the other, and this is what gives it its greatest fury.
T.H. White
#98. 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.
T.H. White
#99. He could do what all men wanted to, that is, fly
T.H. White
#100. 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?
T.H. White
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