R.S. Thomas Quotes

A fair day's wages for a fair day's work.

Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold imagination in describing, these are the cogs on which history soars or flutters and wobbles.

History is a great dust heap.

Evil and good are everywhere, like shadow and substance; inseparable (for men) yet not hostile, only opposed.

Habit and imitation--there is nothing more perennial in us than these two. They are the source of all working, and all apprenticeship, of all practice, and all learning, in this world.

Dinners are defined as 'the ultimate act of communion;' men that can have communion in nothing else, can sympathetically eat together, can still rise into some glow of brotherhood over food and wine.

All evil is like a nightmare; the instant you stir under it, the evil is gone.

The condition of the most passionate enthusiast is to be preferred over the individual who, because of the fear of making a mistake, won't in the end affirm or deny anything

The deepest depth of vulgarism is that of setting up money as the ark of the covenant.

He who cannot withal keep his mind to himself cannot practice any considerable thing whatsoever.

Know what thou canst work at, and work at it like a Hercules.

The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

At worst, is not this an unjust world, full of nothing but beasts of prey, four-footed or two-footed?

If there be not a religious element in the relations of men, such relations are miserable and doomed to ruin.

Rare benevolence, the minister of God.

Democracy will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from delusive to real, and make a new blessed world of us by and by.

At the bottom there is no perfect history; there is none such conceivable. All past centuries have rotted down, and gone confusedly dumb and quiet.

What the light of your mind, which is the direct inspiration of the Almighty, pronounces incredible, that, in God's name, leave uncredited. At your peril do not try believing that!

It is a fact which escapes no one, that, generally speaking, whoso is acquainted with his worth has but a little stock to cultivate acquaintance with.

Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its powers of endurance.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

The goal of yesterday will be our starting-point to-morrow.

If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.

Friend, hast thou considered the "rugged, all-nourishing earth," as Sophocles well names her; how she feeds the sparrow on the housetop, much more her darling man?

Earnestness alone makes life eternity.

Be a pattern to others, and then all will go well; for as a whole city is affected by the licentious passions and vices of great men, so it is likewise reformed by their moderation.

Piety does not mean that a man should make a sour face about things, and refuse to enjoy in moderation what his Maker has given.

Nature admits no lie.

Pain was not given thee merely to be miserable under; learn from it, turn it to account.

Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them: only small mean souls are otherwise.

What are your historical Facts still more your biographical Wilt thou know a man by stringing-together beadrolls of what thou namest Facts

Well might the ancients make silence a god; for it is the element of all godhood, infinitude, or transcendental greatness,--at once the source and the ocean wherein all such begins and ends.

Is man’s civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?

The greatest mistake is to imagine that we never err.

Not our Logical, Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us; I might say, Priest and Prophet to lead us heavenward; or Magician and Wizard to lead us hellward.

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

The sincere alone can recognize sincerity.

Pin thy faith to no man's sleeve. Hast thou not two eyes of thy own?

The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive.

A judicious man looks at Statistics, not to "get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted 'on him".

Whose school-hours are all the days and nights of our existence.

Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporter's gallery yonder, there sat a fourth estate more important far than they all.

No violent extreme endures.

Dishonesty is the raw material not of quacks only, but also in great part dupes.

We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.

O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts!

To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow.

The true eye for talent presupposes the true reverence for it.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.