R.S. Thomas Quotes

What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.

Trust thyself only and another shall not betray thee.

Truth ever lovely - since the world began The foe of tyrants and the friend of man.

How lovely are the portals of the night When stars come out to watch the daylight die.

Violence is essentially wordless and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down.

A fair day's wages for a fair day's work: it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of government.

Constantly choose rather to want less than to have more.

What millions died - that Caesar might be great!

General Taylor never surrenders.

Riches enlarge rather than satisfy appetites.

The weakest and most timorous are the most revengeful and implacable.

He knows little who will tell his wife all he knows.

Nothing is easy to the unwilling.

Don't let your will roar when your power only whispers.

Men never think their fortunes too great nor their wit too little.

Women forgive injuries but never forget slights.

Never wedding ever wooing Still a lovelorn heart pursuing Read you not the wrong you're doing In my cheek's pale hue? All my life with sorrow strewing Wed or cease to woo.

Dialect words - those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

Soft words are hard arguments.

Speech is civilization itself. The word even the most contradictory word preserves contact - it is silence which isolates.

All work is seed sown. It grows and spreads and sows itself anew.

He that can work is a born king of something.

Honest labor bears a lovely face.

I never did anything worth doing by accident nor did any of my inventions come by accident they came by work.

Cast away care he that loves sorrow lengthens not a day nor can he buy tomorrow.

Misfortunes tell us what fortune is.

What though youth gave love and roses Age still leaves us friends and wine.

Laugh soon because you never know how soon it will be too late

The laugh came then, a marvelous honking hoorah so infectious that Dill felt it should be quarantined.

For as love is oftentimes won with beauty, so it is not kept, preserved, and continued, but by virtue and obedience.

If I really seem vain, it is that I am only vain in my ways—not in my heart. The worst women are those vain in their hearts, and not in their ways.

Here rests his head upon the lap of earthA youth to fortune and to fame unknown.Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth, And Melancholy marked him for her own.

it is not the first language that is all-important, but which language captures the adolescent's imagination when he or she first discovers literature.

To be successful, you have to have your heart in your business and your business in your heart.

Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

Publishing is a very mysterious business. It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good.

Its attitude, which it has preached and practiced, is skepticism. Now, it finds, the public is applying that skepticism to the press.

With all due respect to the nation's fish and game departments, more deer die because people hunt them than because people feed them.

Great men are rarely isolated mountain peaks they are the summits of ranges.

You're always at war with the guy on the other bench. You pick up their patterns. That's what I got the most out of this year. I know what other coaches like to do.

If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.

American democracy must be a failure because it places the supreme authority in the hands of the poorest and most ignorant part of the society.

Though lovers be lost, love shall not.

Choose your love, Love your choice.

Absence sharpens love, presence strengthens it.

No, there's nothing half so sweet in life as love's young dream.

Words may be false and full of art Sighs are the natural language of the heart.

Patience and tenacity are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.

My brothers and sisters, true love is a reflection of the Savior's love. In December of each year we call it the Christmas spirit. You can hear it. You can see it. You can feel it.

My brothers and sisters, may the spirit of love which comes at Christmastime fill our homes and our lives and linger there long after the tree is down and the lights are put away for another year.