R.S. Thomas Quotes

Life is a series of lessons that have to be understood.

Variety is the condition of harmony.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.

All history . . . is an inarticulate Bible.

Skepticism means, not intellectual doubt alone, but moral doubt.

The end of Man is an Action, and not a Thought, though it were the noblest?

Speech that leads not to action, still more that hinders it, is a nuisance on the earth.

A word spoken in season, at the right moment; is the mother of ages.

Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in heaven.

He who talks much about virtue in the abstract, begins to be suspected; it is shrewdly guessed that where there is great preaching there will be little almsgiving.

The modern majesty consists in work. What a man can do is his greatest ornament, and he always consults his dignity by doing it.

And yet without labour there were no ease, no rest, so much as conceivable.

Work earnestly at anything, you will by degrees learn to work at all things.

The cut of a garment speaks of intellect and talent and the color of temperament and heart.

Look to be treated by others as you have treated others.

If those gentlemen would let me alone I should be much obliged to them. I would say, as Shakespeare would say... Sweet Friend, for Jesus sake forbear.

The nobleness of silence. The highest melody dwells only in silence,--the sphere melody, the melody of health.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

Conviction never so excellent, is worthless until it coverts itself into conduct.

In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.

In this world there is one godlike thing, the essence of all that was or ever will be of godlike in this world: the veneration done to Human Worth by the hearts of men.

The true past departs not, no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die; but all is still here, and, recognized or not, lives and works through endless change.

A man--be the heavens ever praised!--is sufficient for himself.

There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man.

A Fourth Estate, of Able Editors, springs up.

An everlasting lodestar, that beams the brighter in the heavens the darker here on earth grows the night.

Insurrection, never so necessary, is a most sad necessity; and governors who wait for that to instruct them are surely getting into the fatalest course.

No man is born without ambitious worldly desires.

I want to meet my God awake.

Genuine Work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal, as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself.

It is well said, in every sense, that a man's religion is the chief fact with regard to him.

So here hath been dawning Another blue day; Think, wilt thou let it Slip useless away? Out of eternity This new day is born, Into eternity At night will return.

How indestructibly the good grows, and propagates itself, even among the weedy entanglements of evil.

Money will buy money's worth; but the thing men call fame, what is it?

Evil, once manfully fronted, ceases to be evil; there is generous battle-hope in place of dead, passive misery; the evil itself has become a kind of good.

Not one false man but doth uncountable evil.

There is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in Idleness alone is there perpetual despair.

The true epic of our times is not "Arm's and the Man," but "Tools and the Man"--an infinitely wider kind of epic.

Experience takes dreadfully high school-wages, but he teaches like no other.

Fire is the best of servants, but what a master!

Also, what mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry dig up from the past time and name it History.

Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business: and gives in the long run a net result of zero.

Skepticism . . . is not intellectual only it is moral also, a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul.

The king is the man who can.

The authentic insight and experience of any human soul, were it but insight and experience in hewing of wood and drawing of water, is real knowledge, a real possession and acquirement.

We really think it is a good thing for scientists to spend a little bit of their time either in the community or in schools or helping to train high school teachers.

By the very constitution of our nature moral evil is its own curse.

The memory of past favors is like a rainbow, bright, vivid, and beautiful; but it soon fades away. The in memory of injuries is engraved on the heart, and remains forever.

Fact is stranger than fiction.