R.S. Thomas Quotes

The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude.

To love our nothingness we must love everything in us that the proud man loves when he loves himself. But we must love it all for exactly the opposite reason.

It is true that we are called to create a better world. But we are first of all called to a more immediate and exalted task: that of creating our own lives.

Our whole life is a meditation of our last decision - the only decision that matters.

While some men see ordinary happenings, others see divine light and guidance.

Shakespeare is forever coming into our affairs -- putting in his oar, so to speak -- with some pat word or sentence.

Contemplative living is living in true relationship with oneself, God, others and nature, free of the illusions of separateness.

To worship our false selves is to worship nothing. And the worship of nothing is hell.

Take more time, cover less ground.

To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell.

Be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man for it is the image of God.

And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. it is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept.

With the tears a Land hath shed. Their graves should ever be green.

Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.

Grace is not a strange, magic substance which is subtly filtered into our souls to act as a kind of spiritual penicillin. Grace is unity, oneness within ourselves, oneness with God.

We're genuinely happy if some musicians of this younger generation are influenced by our music, as we were ourselves influenced 10 years ago by older musicians.

Children need continuity as they grow and learn.

Let us live in peace and harmony to keep the land and all life in balance. Only prayer and meditation can do that.

Plato feels that ethical abstinences and austerities are essential preconditions for the cleansing and opening of the eye of the soul.

Zimbabwe is a lost country. There is no money in Zimbabwe, everything stands still. The economy of the country is in shambles, the inflation is the highest in this world.

The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity.

What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.

I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois try to arrest me...I don't know which makes me feel worse.

A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.

One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.

It is an acknowledged truth in philosophy that a just theory will always be confirmed by experiment.

The main peculiarity which distinguishes man from other animals is the means of his support - the power which he possesses of very greatly increasing these means.

It is a mere futile process to exchange one set of commodities for another, if the parties; after this new distribution of goods has taken place, are not better off than they were before.

The constant effort towards population, which is found even in the most vicious societies, increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are increased.

That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.

The very purpose of a knight is to fight on behalf of a lady.

The joy of love is too short, and the sorrow thereof, and what cometh thereof, dureth over long.

Politeness has been well defined as benevolence in small things.

Parent of sweetest sounds, yet mute forever.

Grief is the tax we pay on our attachments.

I have died so little today, friend, forgive me.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

Our judgment ripens; our imagination decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the Spring of life and the fruits of its Autumn.

What we do, as a conscious species, is set markers for ourselves. Once we reach one marker, we advance to the next.

Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularity is indispensable to the creations of the imagination.

All problems exist in the absence of a good conversation.

In the first movement alone, I took note of six pregnancies and at least four miscarriages.

The British like any kind of music so long as it is loud.

Think of what would happen to us... if there were no humorists; life would be one long Congressional Record.

Seventy million books in America's libraries, but the one you want to read is always out.

As lovers of truth, we want to be close to it. Sometimes - evil thought, evil temptation - we want to be close to it by misleading others about its presence.

History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.

I have just been all round the world and have formed a very poor opinion of it.

This is the highest miracle of genius, that things which are not should be as though they were, that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another.