R.S. Thomas Quotes
The combat deepens. On, ye brave, Who rush to glory or the grave! Wave, Munich! all thy banners wave, And charge with all thy chivalry!
All our pride is but a jest. None are worst and none are best. Grief and hope and joy and fear Play their pageant everywhere.
Lost is our freedom When we submit to women so: Why do we need 'em When, in their best, they work our woe?
If all would lead their lives in love like me, Then bloody swords and armor should not be; No drum nor trumpet peaceful sleeps should move, Unless alarm came from the camp of love.
Fortune, honour, beauty, youth, Are but blossoms dying; Wanton pleasures, doting love, Are but shadows flying.
The man whose silent daysIn harmless joys are spent,Whom hopes cannot delude,Nor sorrow discontent:That man needs neither towersNor armour for defence,Nor secret vaults to flyFrom thunder's violence.
Yet I would not die a maid, because I had a mother, As I was by one brought forth, I would bring forth another.
Speech is too often not the art of concealing thought, but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal.
The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows. The greatest of faults, I should say is to be conscious of none.
Why tell me that a man is a fine speaker, if it is not the truth that he is speaking?
There is often more spiritual force in a proverb than in whole philosophical systems.
Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man!
Rest is a fine medicine. Let your stomachs rest, ye dyspeptics; let your brain rest, you wearied and worried people of business; let your limbs rest, ye children of toil!
Money, in truth, can do much, but it cannot do all. We must know the province of it, and confine it there, and even spurn it back when it wishes to get farther.
Laws themselves, political Constitutions, are not our Life; but only the house wherein our Life is led.
By nature man hates change; seldom will he quit his old home till it has actually fallen around his ears.
Time is the silent, never-resting thing ... rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing oceantide, on which we and all the universe swim.
Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film.
It is in general more profitable to reckon up our defeats than to boast of our attainments.
There are depths in man that go to the lowest hell, and heights that reach the highest heaven, for are not both heaven and hell made out of him, everlasting miracle and mystery that he is.
Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows because they are wiser.
One is weary of hearing about the omnipotence of money. I will say rather that, for a genuine man, it is not evil to be poor.
The suffering man ought really to consume his own smoke; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire.
It is now almost my sole rule of life to clear myself of cants and formulas, as of poisonous Nessus shirts.
Democracy will prevail when men believe the vote of Judas as good as that of Jesus Christ.
It is great, and there is no other greatness-to make one nook of God's Creation more fruitful, better, more worthy of God; to make some human heart a little wiser, manlier, happier-more blessed.
What are your Axioms, and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words.... Be not the slave of Words.
A mind that has seen, and suffered, and done, speaks to us of what it has tried and conquered.
Wealth of a man is the number of things which he loves and blesses which he is loved and blessed by.
Nature is the time-vesture of God that reveals Him to the wise, and hides him from the foolish.
