R.S. Thomas Quotes

In the poorest cottage are Books: is one Book, wherein for several thousands of years the spirit of man has found light, and nourishment, and an interpreting response to whatever is Deepest in him.

In no time whatever can small critics entirely eradicate out of living men's hearts a certain altogether peculiar collar reverence for Great Men--genuine admiration, loyalty, adora-tion.

Macaulay is well for awhile, but one wouldn't live under Niagara.

A poor creature who has said or done nothing worth a serious man taking the trouble of remembering.

In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.

Cash-payment is not the sole nexus of man with man.

Professors of the Dismal Science, I perceive the length of your tether is now pretty well run; and I must request you to talk a little lower in the future.

persons, with big wigs many of them and austere aspect, whom I take to be Professors of the Dismal Science… Coining “Dismal Science” as a nickname for Political Economy

It is not honest inquiry that makes anarchy; but it is error, insincerity, half belief and untruth that make it.

I had a lifelong quarrel with God, but in the end we made up.

The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.

A pygmy standing on the outward crust of this small planet, his far-reaching spirit stretches outward to the infinite, and there alone finds rest.

The Highest Being reveals himself in man.

Out of the lowest depths there is a path to the loftiest heights.

I call that [Book of Job], apart from all theories about it, one of the grandest things ever written with pen.

There is but one temple in this Universe: The Body. We speak to God whenever we lay our hands upon it.

God Almighty never created a man half as wise as he looks.

No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy.

History is the distillation of rumour.

There needs not a great soul to make a hero; there needs a god-created soul which will be true to its origin; that will be a great soul!

We have chosen Mahomet not as the most eminent Prophet; but as the one we are freest to speak of. He is by no means the truest of Prophets; but I do esteem him a true one.

Of our thinking it is but the upper surface that we shape into articulate thought; underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse lies the region of meditation.

Let me have my own way in exactly everything and a sunnier and pleasanter creature does not exist.

There is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet.

I have no patience whatever with these gorilla damnifications of humanity.

It is not a lucky word, this name impossible; no good comes of those who have it so often in their mouths.

A false man found a religion? Why, a false man cannot build a brick house!

Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.

I came hither [Craigenputtoch] solely with the design to simplify my way of life and to secure the independence through which I could be enabled to remain true to myself.

The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."

A fair day's wage for a fair day's work": it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing. It is the everlasting right of man.

Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world?

Roguery is thought by some to be cunning and laughable: it is neither; it is devilish.

Clean undeniable right, clear undeniable might: either of these once ascertained puts an end to battle. All battle is a confused experiment to ascertain one and both of these.

We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highway; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.

High Air-castles are cunningly built of Words, the Words well bedded also in good Logic-mortar; wherein, however, no Knowledge will come to lodge.

To a shower of gold most things are penetrable.

Man's earthly interests,'are all hooked and buttoned together, and held up, by Clothes.

The true Sovereign of the world, who moulds the world like soft wax, according to his pleasure, is he who lovingly sees into the world.

Close thy Byron ; open thy Goethe .

Beautiful it is, and a gleam from the same eternal pole-star visible amid the destinies of men, that all talent, all intellect, is in the first plane moral. What a world were this otherwise!

I have seen gleams in the face and eyes of the man that have let you look into a higher country.

Society is founded on hero-worship.

The graceful minuet-dance of fancy must give place to the toilsome, thorny pilgrimage of understanding. On the transition from the age of romance to that of science.

Men worship the shows of great men; the most disbelieve that there is any reality of great men to worship.

Love not pleasure; love God. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved.

In the huge mass of evil as it rolls and swells, there is ever some good working toward deliverance and triumph.

We do everything by custom, even believe by it; our very axioms, let us boast of free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such beliefs as we have never heard questioned.

What unknown seas of feeling lie in man, and will from time to time break through!