R.S. Thomas Quotes

You never know yourself till you know more than your body.

The sense itself was I. I felt no dross or matter in my soul, no brims or borders, such as in a bowl we see. My essence was capacity.

...(that) any general system of conveying passengers would ... go at a velocity exceeding ten miles an hour, or thereabouts, is extremely improbable.

In March and in April from morning till night In sowing and seeding good housewives delight.

There is justice in hell, but sin is the most unjust thing. It would rob God of his glory, Christ of his purchase, the soul of its happiness.

God will not be behind-hand in love to us: for our drop, we shall receive an ocean.

A wicked man in prayer may lift up his hands, but he cannot lift up his face.

The fastest way to succeed is to double your rate of failure.

None so empty of grace as he that thinks he is full.

O time! whose verdicts mock our own, the only righteous judge art thou!

Only the dead know Brooklyn.

For like to like, the proverb saith.

For as saith a proverb notable, Each thing seeketh his semblable.

The race cannot succeed, nor build strong citizens, until we have a race of women competent to do more than bear a brood of negative men.

Does a bibliophile ever have enough room on his shelves? The answer is obvious: get more shelves.

He is the greatest influence in the world today. There is... a fifth Gospel being written - the work of Jesus Christ in the hearts and lives of men and nations.

We cannot make up for failure in our devotional life by redoubling energy in service. We shall never take people beyond our own spiritual attainment.

Our thinking will automatically improve when we remember the words of Paul: 'know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and the spirit of God dwelleth in you?

So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.

You won't find the truth of life in morbidity, only in hope.

Learned arguments do not make a man holy and righteous, whereas a good life makes him dear to God.

I am not afraid of death, which after all can't be far away. What does frighten me, though, is the halfway stage.

[I'm]a freak user of words, not a poet.

Progress is born of doubt and inquiry. The Church never doubts, never inquires. To doubt is heresy, to inquire is to admit that you do not know—the Church does neither.

It's a noir world. Unfair things happen.

I will no longer wound myself with the thoughts and questions that have surrounded me like thorns: that is a penance You do not ask of me.

The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.

What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.

Speech is civilization itself.

It is much safer to obey than to rule.

Hands have not tears to flow.

There is no man so low down that the cure for his condition does not lie strictly within himself.

Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.

Be not a slave of words.

The Golden Girls certainly proved that there was a large audience for a show about older women.

Optimists are usually wrong. But all the great change in history, positive change, was done by optimists.

Learn what is true in order to do what is right.

The more wit the less courage.

It is hard to read a newspaper or watch a television newscast without encountering someone who has come up with a new 'solution' to society's 'problems.'

when a person implores you to be reasonable what he means is that you should speed round forthwith to his point of view.

Our success as consultants will depend upon the essential rightness of the advice we give and our capacity for convincing those in authority that it is good.

My dad's a very shrewd, clever guy.

Anybody who thinks there is any vague chance of adult exchange with a child is up the spout; and would be much less disappointed if they recognized the chasm unbridgeably dividing them.

To suggest that a person's strongly held religious view is less tolerant than a strongly held antireligious view is morally, intellectually, and politically inconsistent and incorrect.

Nowhere have the forces of intolerance been displayed less tolerantly than in the area of religious speech and practice.

Politicians have limited power. They can't impose morality on themselves. How can they impose it on the country?

If it ain't about what's real, what's happenin' right now, it ain't the blues.

I do think that our freedoms are at risk.

So many of our conversations (about affirmative action) have been dishonest

Poetry is what makes my toenails twinkle.