R.S. Thomas Quotes

When you're leading, don't talk.

The law is bigger than money - but only if the law works hard enough.

Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.

With the parties at virtual parity and the ideological gulf between them never greater, the stakes of majority control of Congress are extremely high.

Students learn best not by reading the Great Books in a closed room but by opening the doors and windows of experience.

Intemperance in talk makes dreadful havoc in the heart.

It costs more to revenge injuries than to bear them.

And by the same token, I appreciate math, because I can't do math. If I have to read a map or figure out the tip on a restaurant bill, I might start to tear up a little bit.

If you going to live by a certain code - as Bob Dylan said, you gotta serve somebody.

I was an artistic dilettante for a while, in photography and collage and the visual arts.

Most election analysts in the U.S. habitually confuse the sound of money talking with the voice of the people.

How happy a thing were a wedding, And a bedding, If a man might purchase a wife For a twelvemonth and a day

It is the weather, not work, that wears out sails.

There is no substitute for face-to-face reporting and research.

I'm from Minnesota. I'm optimistic. I mean, that's just who I am.

It is hard to partner with someone when you become so radioactive no one wants to stand next to you.

The way to really create justice for workers in America is to create job growth.

We seek opinions that are likely to support what we want to be true.

One principal characteristic of vice in the present age is the contempt of fame.

Each in his narrow cell forever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

Chill penury repress'd their noble rage, And froze the genial current of the soul.

There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief, without the help of other argument.

The time will come, when thou shalt lift thine eyes To watch a long-drawn battle in the skies. While aged peasants, too amazed for words, Stare at the flying fleets of wondrous birds.

But knowledge to their eyes her ample page Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll; Chill Penury repressed their noble rage, And froze the genial current of the soul.

Scatter plenty o'er a smiling land.

From Helicon's harmonious springs A thousand rills their mazy progress take.

The hues of bliss more brightly glow, Chastis'd by sabler tints of woe.

[Gresham's Law]: Bad money drives out good money.

If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.

- the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man.

We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.

Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.

I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times anon, and leaping from place to place over oblivion.

They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.

...he seemed to approach the grave as an hyperbolic curve approaches a line, less directly as he got nearer, till it was doubtful if he would ever reach it at all.

Hannibal at eighteen was rooting for Mephistopheles and contemptuous of Faust, but he only half-listened to the climax. He was watching and breathing Lady Murasaki...

Life's too slippery for books, Clarice; anger appears as lust, lupus presents as hives.

We routinely leave our small children in day care among strangers. At the same time, in our guilt we evince paranoia about strangers and foster fear in children.

The most stable elements, Clarice, appear in the middle of the periodic table, roughly between iron and silver. Between iron and silver. I think that is appropriate for you.

Tell me the tales that to me were so dear, Long, long ago, long, long ago.

Oh! where do fairies hide their heads, When snow lies on the hills, When frost has spoiled their mossy beds, And crystallized their rills?

Why don't the men propose, Mamma? Why don't the men propose?

Doing nothing in the public policy world allows much more to be done in the real world.

Some people are going to be happy (with my decision). Some people aren't. But I must live my life.

The British government - any government - is potentially the worst [architectural] client in the world.

Then marriage may be said to be past in all quietnesse, when the wife is blind, and the husband deafe.

That Time could turn up his swift sandy glass, To untell the days.

... it is one thing to desire, another to be in capacity fit for what we desire.

There is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind while we live here.

Opinion of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion to what men fear, and talking of things casual for prognostics, consisteth the natural seeds of religion