R.S. Thomas Quotes

Self-interest, or rather self-love, or egoism, has been more plausibly substituted as the basis of morality.

Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.

A vision without resources is an hallucination.

What is al Qaeda? It's an open source religious political movement that works off the global supply chain.

Decades after a person has stopped collecting bubble gum cards, he can still discover himself collecting ballparks... their smells, their special seasons, their moods.

It's nice to be able to forget.

You have a number of choices. You could continue to always fight against people who are really distractions. They're people in the cheap seats of life. Or you can do what you went there to do.

Imaginative truth is the most immediate way of presenting ultimate reality to a human being... ultimate reality is what we call God.

Hindsight is an exact science. Hold fast to your dreams, for it dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly. How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.

To define each of us by our race is nothing short of a denial of our humanity.

I have been all men known to history, Wondering at the world and at time passing; I have seen evil, and the light blessing Innocent love under a spring sky.

I turn now not to the Bible but to Wallace Stevens.

Hope can see heaven through the thickest clouds.

The wretched Artist himself is alternatively the lowest worm that ever crawled when no fire is in him; or the loftiest God that ever sand when the fire is going.

The soil is the gift of God to the living.

The darker the berry, the sweeter the juice.

He that travels much knows much.

He that has a great nose, thinks everybody is speaking of it.

Don't ask who said it? Ask what they said.

Contemplation is the loving sense of this life, this presence and this eternity.

Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism.

I trust there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian.

Beware of the person of one book.

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

Come watch with me the shaft of fire that glows in yonder West; the fair, frail palaces, The fading Alps and archipelagoes and great cloud continents of sunset-seas.

What probing deep Has ever solved the mystery of sleep?

A person with a clear purpose will make progress, even on the roughest road. A person with no purpose will make no progress, even on the smoothest road.

In idleness there is a perpetual despair.

Be thou what thou singly art and personate only thyself. Swim smoothly in the stream of thy nature and live but one man.

It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.

A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.

Felicity is a continual progress of the desire from one object to another, the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter.

Jasmine is sweet, and has many loves.

It is not only vain, but wicked, in a legislator to frame laws in opposition to the laws of nature, and to arm them with the terrors of death. This is truly creating crimes in order to punish them.

The gate of heaven is everywhere.

If we seek paradise outside ourselves, we cannot have paradise in our hearts.

Providence has given to the French the empire of the land, to the English that of the sea, to the Germans that of--the air!

A man cannot lay down the right of resisting them that assault him by force, to take away his life.

Sin is hell, grace is heaven; what madness it is to look more at hell than heaven.

The Present only has a being in Nature; things Past have a being in the Memory only, but things to come have no being at all; the Future but a fiction of the mind.

Once the mind has been expanded by a big idea, it will never go back to its original state.

The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and in-grafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man.

The only way to make a man worthy of love is by loving him.

Whatever the outcome of the day I shall never forget that you hit me when I wasn't even looking!

We have the promise of God's being our God, and of the blessing by Christ for ourselves, as we are Abraham's seed, yet take the whole promise collectively made to him and us.

Charity is the form, mover, mother and root of all the virtues.

The soul is perfected by knowledge and virtue.

In books lies the soul fo the whole past time.

Meditation is one of the ways in which the spiritual man keeps himself awake.

Likewise grace and glory are referred to the same genus, since grace is nothing other than a certain first beginning of glory in us.