R.S. Thomas Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Things just enter reality through photographs.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Seeming to do is not doing.

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.

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

Instead of seeing the rug being pulled from under us, we can learn to dance on the shifting carpet.

The principle was, death should not be entered like some snug harbor. It should be an unambiguous refusal to surrender.

Why did not somebody teach me the constellations, and make me at home in the starry heavens, which are always overhead, and which I don't half know to this day?

We're quite lucky that we've got political freedoms. We should be using them.

Each paradigm will be shown to satisfy more or less the criteria that it dictates for itself and to fall short of a few of those dictated by its opponent.

Try to reject war and give peace a chance. Question the powers that be and find out why they make the dubious decisions they do that send young people to war.

I'm decrepit but I don't want to give up, and I love my work.

I don't think there are any rude questions.

Ideas without execution are hallucinations.

As I am never better than when I am mad; then methinks I am a brave fellow; then I do wonders: but reason abuseth me, and there's the torment, there's the hell.

Then haste we down to meet thy friends and foes; To place thy friends in ease, the rest in woes. For here though death doth end their misery, I'll there begin their endless tragedy.

First be sure a thing is wanted or needed, then go ahead.

Friendship is the heaven of life.

Sir, the slowness of genius is hard to bear, but the slowness of mediocrity is insufferable.

A man is never astonished that he doesn't know what another does, but he is surprised at the gross ignorance of the other in not knowing what he does.

There are principles which govern our life-they are the principles of Life. If our life is lived according to these principles all is well, and harmony reigns in place of vexation and struggle.

A feather will weigh down a scale when there is nothing in the opposite one.

If I had not had so much ambition and not tried to do so many things, I probably would have been happier, but less useful.

All the arts in America are a gigantic racket run by unscrupulous men for unhealthy women.

Basketball is not played simply with X's and O's. It's played with both trust and confidence.

The secret of my vigor and activity is that I have managed to have a lot of fun.