R.S. Thomas Quotes
Let Time and Chance combine, combine! Let Time and Chance combine! The fairest love from heaven above, That love of yours was mine, My Dear! That love of yours was mine.
Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity; men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.
A force as of madness in the hands of reason has done all that was ever done in the world.
Freedom is the one purport, wisely aimed at, or unwisely, of all man's struggles, toilings and sufferings, in this earth.
Perfect ignorance is quiet, perfect knowledge is quiet; not so the transition from the former to the latter.
O Time! Time! how it brings forth and devours! And the roaring flood of existence rushes on forever similar, forever changing!
A very sea of thought; neither calm nor clear, if you will, yet wherein the toughest pearl-diver may dive to his utmost depth, and return not only with sea-wreck but with true orients.
A background of wrath, which can be stirred up to the murderous infernal pitch, does lie in every man.
Our very walking is an incessant falling; a falling and a catching of ourselves before we come actually to the pavement. It is emblematic of all things a man does.
Is there no God, then, but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe?
On the whole, I would bid you stand up to your work, whatever it may be, and not be afraid of it; not in sorrows or contradictions to yield, but to push on towards the goal.
After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books.
There are female dandies as well as clothes-wearing men; and the former are as objectionable as the latter.
Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form is a wrapping of traditions, hearsay's, and mere words.
The person who cannot laugh is not only ready for treason, and deceptions, their whole life is already a treason and deception.
Man is, and was always, a block-head and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider.
And man's little Life has Duties that are great, that are alone great, and go up to Heaven and down to Hell.
The Builder of this Universe was wise, He plann'd all souls, all systems, planets, particles: The Plan He shap'd all Worlds and Æons by, Was-Heavens!-was thy small Nine-and-thirty Articles!
The mystery of a person, indeed, is ever divine to him that has a sense for the godlike.
The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick: this is the physician's aphorism, and applicable in a far wider sense than he gives it.
Venerable to me is the hard hand,--crooked, coarse,--wherein, notwithstanding, lies a cunning virtue, indispensably royal as of the sceptre of the planet.
Men are grown mechanical in head and in the heart, as well as in the hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force of any kind.
What, in the devil's name, is the use of respectability, with never so many gigs and silver spoons, if thou inwardly art the pitifulness of all men?
The aristocracy of feudal parchment has passed away with a mighty rushing, and now, by a natural course, we arrive at aristocracy of the money-bag.
It is meritorious to insist on forms; religion and all else naturally clothes itself in forms. Everywhere the formed world is the only habitable one.
Does not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is really above him?
Not only was Thebes built by the music of an Orpheus; but without the music of some inspired Orpheus was no city ever built, no work that man glories in ever done.
Misery which, through long ages, had no spokesman, no helper, will now be its own helper and speak for itself.
