R.S. Thomas Quotes

As well might you leave the fairies to plough your land or the idle winds to sow it, as sit down and wait for freedom.

Seeming to do is not doing.

I try not to invent things that people don't need.

Allow me to offer my congratulations on the truly admirable skill you have shown in keeping clear of the mark. Not to have hit once in so many trials, argues the most splendid talents for missing.

The study of sickness is the most poetic of the sciences.

Enough if every age produce two or three critics of this esoteric class, with here and there a reader to understand them.

A lie should be trampled on and extinguished wherever found. I am for fumigating the atmosphere when I suspect that falsehood, like pestilence, breathes around me.

I don't think you could have a 7 with a manual. But I can't see having a BMW sports sedan without a manual.

But once in a while you might see me at In and Out Burger; they make the best fast food hamburgers around.

Education isn't play--and it can't be made to look like play. It is hard, hard work. But it can be made interesting work.

What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.

Things just enter reality through photographs.

Working with existing pictures, like I do, you constantly think about the flood of images we are subjected to and you want to figure out how you can make sense of it.

Life is a one-way street and you're not coming back.

You master Monday! You start winning the day! You start winning the week! Then the month! Then the year!

Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.

I am long on ideas, but short on time. I expect to live to be only about a hundred.

To get to that next level, you gotta learn to get comfortable being uncomfortable.

I owe my success to the fact that I never had a clock in my workroom. Seventy-five of us worked twenty hours every day and slept only four hours - and thrived on it.

To be successful, you only need one person to believe!

Success is not for the weak and uncommitted... Sometimes it's gonna hurt!

At some point in life you have to face your fears.

You have to take advantage of the opportunity of a lifetime in the lifetime of the opportunity.

When all your energy gone! When you have nothing left! That's when it's show time!

Character is better than ancestry, and personal conduct is more important than the highest parentage.

Something had gone amiss with men, and the weak ones were dangerous.

As well as any bloom upon a flower I like the dust on the nettles, never lost Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.

The trouble is, you can't properly present something you don't believe in.

It's funny, but... you're sort of a moving target for fortune, and you never know when it will befall you.

To me, the idea and expectation that the day is slowly and surely coming when we will be able to honestly say we are our brother's keeper and not his oppressor is very beautiful .

Nearly every man who develops an idea works it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then he gets discouraged. That's not the place to become discouraged.

Kennedy said that if we had nuclear war we'd kill 300 million people in the first hour. McNamara, who is a good businessman and likes to save, says it would be only 200 million.

Maturity is often more absurd than youth and very frequently is most unjust to youth.

When you first commence painting everything is a muddle. Even the commonest colors seem to have the devil in them.

A worm tells summer better than the clock, The slug's a living calendar of days; What shall it tell me if a timeless insect Says the world wears away?

Men of great conversational powers almost universally practise a sort of lively sophistry and exaggeration which deceives for the moment both themselves and their auditors.

There is a single theme behind all our work-we must reduce population levels.

How soon the labor of men would make a paradise of the earth were it not for misgovernment and a diversion of his energies to selfish interests.

Do not go gentle into the good night. Old age should burn and rage at close of day.

Nothing but a necessity invincible by any other means can justify ... a prostitution of laws, which constitute the pillars of our whole system of jurisprudence.

I'm completely aware of the fact that I'm a control freak.

Every generation enjoys the use of a vast hoard bequeathed to it by antiquity, and transmits that hoard, augmented by fresh acquisitions, to future ages.

Let the mantle of worldly enjoyments hang loose about you, that it may be easily dropped when death comes to carry you into another world.

Well I'd really love to work with Robert De Niro, because he's still the most talented actor out there.

The price of barbecue is eternal vigilance.

Clinton used to like to get out of the White House a lot. He would take night trips to McDonald's, and stuff like that. I think he wanted to get out of the house.

Heroism is the divine relation which, in all times, unites a great man to other men.

We come from a generation that wanted to make electronic music accepted, at a time [when] it was not.

We like the idea that the things we do seem to come out of nowhere.

Everyone's got to be for a child to have a home and love. I mean I don't know anyone who would be against that.