John Galsworthy Quotes (47 Quotes)


    . . . for events are as much the parents of the future as they were the children of the past.

    By the cigars they smoke, and the composers they love, ye shall know the texture of men's souls.

    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.




    He woke at half-past two, an hour which long experience had taught him brings panic intensity to all awkward thoughts. Experience had also taught him that a further waking at the proper hour of eight showed the folly of such panic.

    She made up her mind to tell them to play loud--there was a lot of music in a cornet, if the man would only put his soul into it.

    When one grew old, the whole world was in conspiracy to limit freedom, and for what reason--just to keep the breath in him a little longer. He did not want it at such cost.

    The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy.

    Even grief sobbed itself out in time only Time was good for sorrow--Time who saw the passing of each mood, each emotion in turn Time the layer-to-rest.

    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 the power to do what seems to him to be right, without considering what others may say or think.

    Hilary was no young person, like his niece or Martin, to whom everything seemed simple nor was he an old person like their grandfather, for whom life had lost its complications.

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

    A marvellous speeder-up of Love is War. What might have taken six months, was thus accomplished in three weeks.

    There is left in every man something of the primeval love of stalking.

    When a man with the constitution of Montague Dartie has exercised self control for months from religious motives, and remains unrewarded, he does not curse God and die, he curses God and lives, to the distress of his family.

    . . . 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

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

    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.

    As for the law--it catered for a human nature of which it took a naturally low view.

    He would be setting up as a man of property next, with a place in the country.

    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.

    The talked-about is always the last to hear the talk . . .



    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.

    There are houses whose souls have passed into the limbo of Time, leaving their bodies in the limbo of London.

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

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

    Beneath all manner of kindness and consideration for each other--for their good taste, at all events, had never given way--this tragedy of a woman, who wanted to be loved, slowly killing the power of loving her in the man, had gone on year after year.

    Once admit that we have the right to inflict unnecessary suffering and you destroy the very basis of human society.

    . . . 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.

    A man is the sum of his actions, of what he has done, of what he can do, Nothing else.

    He was frightened by the effect he had produced, and like most men with but little courage, he sought at once to justify himself by bullying.

    I'm bad, he said, pouting--been bad all the week don't sleep at night. The doctor can't tell why. He's a clever fellow, or I shouldn't have him, but I get nothing out of him but bills.

    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.

    One's eyes are what one is, one's mouth is what one becomes.


    . . . as he had often forcibly argued, all experience tended to show that a man must die and whether he died of a miserable old age in his own country, or prematurely of damp in the bottom of a foreign mine, was surely of little consequence, provided that by a change in his mode of life he benefited the British Empire.

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

    Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.

    born to be loved and to love who when not loving are not living

    Its not life that counts but the fortitude you bring into it.

    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.

    The Rector of Worsted Skeynes was not tall, and his head had been rendered somewhat bald by thought.


    James had passed through the fire, but he had passed also through the river of years which washes out the fire he had experienced the saddest experience of all--forgetfulness of what it was like to be in love.


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