R.S. Thomas Quotes
Laws, written, if not on stone tables, yet on the azure of infinitude, in the inner heart of God's creation, certain as life, certain as death, are there, and thou shalt not disobey them.
The hell of these days is the fear of not getting along, especially of not making money.
He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.
Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.
The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for another.
No mortal has a right to wag his tongue, much less to wag his pen, without saying something.
To say that we have a clear conscience is to utter a solecism; had we never sinned we should have had no conscience. Were defeat unknown, neither would victory be celebrated by songs of triumph.
Labor is life: from the inmost heart of the worker rises his God-given force, the sacred celestial life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God!
What an enormous magnifier is tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory and in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it
All destruction, by violent revolution or however it be, is but new creation on a wider scale.
I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic.
Man makes circumstances, and spiritually as well as economically, is the artificer of his own fortune.
Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil; it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.
Scarcely two hundred years back can Fame recollect articulately at all; and there she but maunders and mumbles.
Nakedness, hunger, distress of all kinds, death itself have been cheerfully suffered, when the heart was right. It is the feeling of injustice that is insupportable to all men.
If a book comes from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and author-craft are of small amount to that.
For every one hundred men who can stand adversity there is only one who can withstand prosperity.
The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.
No conquest can ever become permanent which does not show itself beneficial to the conquered as well as to the conquerors.
There is but one thing without honor, smitten with eternal barrenness, inability to do or to be,-insincerity, unbelief.
Good Christian people, here lies for you an inestimable loan; take all heed thereof, in all carefulness, employ it: with high recompense, or else with heavy penalty, will it one day be required back.
This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.
To know, to get into the truth of anything, is ever a mystic art, of which the best logic's can but babble on the surface.
Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.
Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.
Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.
Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.
Before philosophy can teach by Experience, the Philosophy has to be in readiness, the Experience must be gathered and intelligibly recorded.