R.S. Thomas Quotes

How, without clothes, could we possess the master organ, soul's seat and true pineal gland of the body social--I mean a purse?

Metaphysics is the attempt of the mind to rise above the mind.

Shakespeare says, we are creatures that look before and after; the more surprising that we do not look around a little, and see what is passing under our very eyes.

The true Church of England, at this moment, lies in the Editors of the newspapers.

O God, impress upon me the value of time, and give regulation to all my thoughts and to all my movements.

The public! why, the public's nothing better than a great baby.

[Grateful] Cheerfulness is health; its opposite, [ungrateful] melancholy, is disease.

Over-confidence is as evil as undue anxiety.

Punctuality is the sole of business.

Fastidiousness is the envelope of indelicacy.

It is very difficult to apply the old Indian adage 'Do not judge another until you have walked a mile in his moccasins,' unless you get out of your own moccasins first.

Political leaders have to withstand headwinds.

Yesterday's success belongs to yesterday.

A man shall never be enriched by envy.

More terrorists and extremists have been captured or killed in Pakistan than in any place in the world.

If one is to use public funds he must accept a responsibility to the public.

When you take somebody's quote out of context, which happens all the time, nobody's ever going to go and do the research on their own and figure out that you got it wrong.

On an overcrowded planet where more species slip toward extinction every day, should one species have the right to multiply and consume at will, even as it nudges others to oblivion?

We have to be the best global citizens we can be.

In the hyperconnected world, there is only “good” “better” and “best.

Our bailout of Detroit will be remembered as the equivalent of pouring billions of taxpayers' money into the mail-order catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay.

Rock stars get room keys, I get business cards.

The worse the passage the more welcome the port.

'Tis not every question that deserves an answer.

If a customer walks out without shoes, you really want to find out why. 'It didn't fit' is not good enough.

And moody madness laughing wild Amid severest woe.

At a certain point memory becomes a beach strewn with landmines, all life’s many losses buried in those sands.

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

All romances end at marriage.

Women accept their destiny more readily than men.

The defective can be more than the entire.

Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied soul of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than speech.

It occured to Starling how much Roden would benefit from an elbow smash in the hinge of his jaw.

To the makying of bookes of gardenyng there is noe ende.

Leisure is the mother of philosophy; and commonwealth, the mother of peace and leisure.

Covenants without swords are but words.

A free man is he that, in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to.

This is that law of the Gospel; whatsoever you require that others should do to you, that do ye to them.

Whatsoever is the object of any man's Appetite or Desire; that is it which he for his part calleth Good: and the object of his Hate and Aversion, evil.

For to accuse requires less eloquence, such is man's nature, than to excuse; and condemnation, than absolution, more resembles justice.

Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers.

I resolved that, like the sun, as long as my day lasted, I would look on the bright side of everything.

Comfort and indolence are cronies.

Gambling makes boys selfish and cruel as well as men.

If individuality has no play, society does not advance; if individuality breaks out of all bounds, society perishes.

What men of science want is only a fair day's wages for more than a fair day's work.

That mysterious independent variable of political calculation, Public Opinion.

My experience of the world is that things left to themselves don't get right.

I would rather be the offspring of two apes than be a man and afraid to face the truth.

Matter and force are the two names of the one artist who fashions the living as well as the lifeless.