R.S. Thomas Quotes

Hell is where everyone is doing his own thing. Paradise is where everyone is doing God's thing.

Do not that to another, which thou wouldst not have done to thyself.

Ignorance of the law is no good excuse, where every man is bound to take notice of the laws to which he is subject.

The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.

Scruples, temptations, and fears, and cutting perplexities of the heart, are often the lot of the most excellent persons.

Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.

My God, I pray better to you by breathing and walking than by talking, just as in choir I sing best when I am thinking about something else, or better still, praying.

What is ambition but desire of greatness? And what is greatness but extent of power?

Fire and water may as well agree in the same vessel, as grace and sin in the same heart.

The world 's a theatre, the earth a stage, Which God and Nature do with actors fill.

The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction.

In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.

Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.

The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it.

A man who will not leave his room because he does not know how, or is afraid to open the door, is trapped just the same whether or not the door is locked.

The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.

Friendship involves many things but, above all the power of going outside oneself and appreciating what is noble and loving in another.

Fear not, but trust in Providence, Wherever thou may'st be.

To persons uninstructed in natural history, their country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.

Every cell in us worships God.

Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.

Anyone who thinks hard work will never hurt you has never had to pay to have it done. Jesus now has many lovers of his Heavenly Kingdom, but few bearers of his cross.

Ultimately faith is the only key to the universe. The final meaning of human existence, and the answers to the questions on which all our happiness depends cannot be found in any other way.

We must slow down to a human tempo and we’ll begin to have time to listen.

Whatsoever is done in charity, however small and of no reputation it be, bringeth forth good fruit.

There was a danger that skeptics and opponents would misread those likelihood ratio tests as rejections of an entire class of models, which of course they were not.

Christ was either liar, lunatic, or Lord!

The first duty of man is that of subduing fear.

The great accomplishments of man have resulted from the transmission of ideas and enthusiasm.

Do you want to succeed? Then, double you rate of failure. Success lies on the far side of failure.

Activate yourself to duty by remembering your position, who you are, and what you have obliged yourself to be.

We become contemplatives when God discovers Himself in us.

Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.

A man does not always choose what his guardian angel intends.

It is every Americans' right and obligation to read and interpret the Constitution for himself.

Only the person of worth can recognize the worth in others.

Of all the cankers of human happiness none corrodes with so silent, yet so baneful an influence, as indolence.

My wicked heart will ramble on in spite of myself. (Arabella)

Teach me to go to the country beyond words and beyond names.

No man sees far, most see no farther than their noses.

The more [people] know about the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the less they support it.

If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt.

You overrate my capacity of love. I don't posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.

Don't think of what's past!" said she. "I am not going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what tomorrow has in store?

If you bear the cross unwillingly, you make it a burden, and load yourself more heavily; but you must bear it.

The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge.

Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise.

We are the friends of liberty everywhere, but the guarrantors of only our own.

A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a people who mean to be free.