R.S. Thomas Quotes

I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.

In our creation, God asked a question and in our truly living; God answers the question.

We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know a truth that is outside us. But we make ourselves true inside by manifesting the truth as we see it.

It is in the ordinary duties and labors of life that the Christian can and should develop his spiritual union with God.

Prayer and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone.

What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?

Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it.

In the end, it's the reality of personal realtionships that save everything.

People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell.

There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness.

Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.

The end of the world will be legal.

This is the crucifixion of Christ: in which He dies again and again in the individuals who were made to share the joy and freedom of His grace, and who deny Him.

If you want to have a spiritual life you must unify your life. A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all.

The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing.

The man of faith who has never experienced doubt is not a man of faith.

The imagination should be allowed a certain amount of time to browse around.

Stop thinking and start looking.

Love is an intensification of life.

I can only become perfectly free by serving the will of God.

The self is not a thing, but a process.

Subjectivity means to catch yourself in the act.

A genuine odyssey is not about piling up experiences. It is a deeply felt, risky, unpredictable tour of the soul.

The problem in narcissism is not the high ideals and ambitions, it's the difficulty one encounters when trying to give them body.

This wretched brain gave way, and I became a wreck at random driven, without one glimpse of reason or heaven.

To love God, which was a thing far excelling all the cunning that is possible for us in this life to obtain.

Every man has by the law of nature a right to such a waste portion of the earth as is necessary for his subsistence.

There are several sorts of religions, not only in different parts of the island, but even in every town; some worshipping the sun, others the moon or one of the planets.

I still trust my penalty sytem and will be there when I'll be needed.

I'm not sure I understand how responsibility for our choices makes sense if they are not determined.

The Sun shineth as well on the good as the bad: God from on high beholdeth all the workers of iniquity, as well as the upright of heart.

Spring, the sweet Spring, is the year's pleasant king

Honesty needs no disguise nor ornament; be plain.

Clocks will go as they are set, but man, irregular man, is never constant, never certain.

Justice is lame as well as blind, amongst us.

Revenge, the attribute of gods! They stamped it with their great image on our natures.

Honesty was a cheat invented first To bind the hands of bold deserving rogues, That fools and cowards might sit safe in power, And lord it uncontroll'd above their betters.

The man who has nothing to boast of but his illustrious ancestry is like the potato. The best part is underground.

Wit is brushwood; judgment, timber; the one gives the greatest flame, the other yields the most durable heat; and both meeting make the best fire.

A flatterer is the shadow of a fool.

Practical religion consists in doing good: and the only way of serving God is that of endeavoring to make His creation happy. All preaching that has not this for its object is nonsense and hypocrisy.

Virtue is not hereditary.

I would not dare so dishonor my Creator's name by attaching it to this filthy book.

Man must go back to nature for information.

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws.

Civilization, or that which is so called, has operated two ways to make one part of society more affluent and the other part more wretched than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.

Suspicion and persecution are weeds of the same dunghill, and flourish best together.

Priests and conjurors are of the same trade.

Ah, reader, put thy trust in thy creator, and thou wilt be safe; but if thou trustest to the book called the scriptures thou trustest to the rotten staff of fable and falsehood.

But such is the irresistable nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants is the liberty of appearing.