R.S. Thomas Quotes
The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.
Thought, true labor of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the daughter of Pain?
Such is the world. Understand it, despise it, love it; cheerfully hold on thy way through it, with thy eye on highest loadstars!
I know so little about any history. How little do I know even about the history of myself.
The grand result of schooling is a mind with just vision to discern, with free force to do: the grand schoolmaster is Practice.
Have a purpose in life, and having it, throw into your work such strength of mind and muscle as God has given you.
Over the times thou hast no power. . . . Solely over one man thou hast quite absolute power. Him redeem and make honest.
They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death are the allurements that act on the heart of man.
A battle is a terrible conjugation of the verb to kill: I kill, thou killest, he kills, we kill, they kill, all kill.
What is nature? Art thou not the living government of God? O Heaven, is it in very deed He then that ever speaks through thee, that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves in me?
We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.
He that will not work according to his faculty, let him perish according to his necessity: there is no law juster than that.
The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one; it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good; but a calculation of the Profitable.
Government is emphatically a machine: to the discontented a taxing machine, to the contented a machine for securing property.
History, as it lies at the root of all science, is also the first distinct product of man's spiritual nature, his earliest expression of what may be called thought.
Wealth has more and more increased, and at the same time gathered itself more and more into masses, strangely altering the old relations, and increasing the distance between the rich and the poor.
In private life I never knew anyone interfere with other people's disputes but he heartily repented of it.
In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance.
The glory of a workman, still more of a master workman, that he does his work well, ought to be his most precious possession; like the honor of a soldier, dearer to him than life.
No country can find eternal peace and comfort where the vote of Judas Iscariot is as good as the vote of the Saviour of mankind.
Nothing ever happens but once in all this world. What I do now I do once for all. It is over and gone, with all its eternity of solemn meaning.
Great men are the inspired texts of that divine Book of Revelations, whereof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.
The insignificant, the empty, is usually the loud; and after the manner of a drum, is louder even because of its emptiness.
Great men are the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do and attain.
Music... a kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads to the edge of the Infinite.
The philosopher is he to whom the highest has descended, and the lowest has mounted up; who is the equal and kindly brother of all.
A heavenly awe overshadowed and encompassed, as it still ought, and must, all earthly business whatsoever.
Might and right do differ frightfully from hour to hour, but then centuries to try it in, they are found to be identical.
The dead are all holy, even they that were base and wicked while alive. Their baseness and wickedness was not they, was but the heavy and unmanageable environment that lay round them.
The wise man is but a clever infant, spelling letters from a hieroglyphical prophetic book, the lexicon of which lies in eternity.