John Galsworthy Quotes

We are all familiar with the argument: Make war dreadful enough, and there will be no war. And we none of us believe it.

It's always worth while before you do anything to consider whether it's going to hurt another person more than is absolutely necessary.

It's not life that counts but the fortitude you bring into it.

Dreaming is the poetry of Life, and we must be forgiven if we indulge in it a little.

He might wish and wish and never get it - the beauty and the loving in the world!

I drink the wine of aspiration and the drug of illusion. Thus I am never dull.

See what perils do environ those who meddle with hot iron.

Dawn has power to fertilise the most matter-of-fact vision.

The talked-about is always the last to hear the talk ...

Only out of stir and change is born new salvation. To deny that is to deny belief in man, to turn our backs on courage!

As a man lives and thinks, so he will write.

Beginnings are always messy.

That tendency ... to lie awake between the hours of two and four, when the chrysalis of faint misgiving becomes so readily the butterfly of panic.

Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.

By the cigars they smoke, and the composers they love, ye shall know the texture of men's souls.

Mechanism! Everywhere
mechanism! Devices for getting away from life so complete that there seemed no life to get away from.

And yet, in books were comfort and diversion; and they were wanted!

Not the least hard thing to bear when they go from us, these quiet friends, is that they carry away with them so many years of our own lives.

I think the greatest thing in the world is to believe in people.

Once admit that we have the right to inflict unnecessary suffering and you destroy the very basis of human society.

Memory heaps dead leaves on corpse-like deeds, from under which they do but vaguely offend the sense.

If you do not think about the future, you cannot have one.

A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.

Love! Beyond meaure - beyond death - it nearly kills. But one wouldn't have been without it.

Justice is a machine which, when someone has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself.

Wishes father thought, but they don't breed evidence.

A man is the sum of his actions, of what he has done, of what he can do, Nothing else.

Love of beauty is really only the sex instinct, which nothing but complete union satisfies.

The French cook; we open tins.

When Man evolved Pity, he did a queer thing - deprived himself of the power of living life as it is without wishing it to become something different.

He won't be happy till he gets it," said Michael, at last: "The only thing is, you see, he doesn't know what IT is.

Really," said Winifred suddenly; "it almost seems like Fate. Only that's so old-fashioned.

The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy.

Wealth is a means to an end, not the end itself. As a synonym for health and happiness, it has had a fair trial and failed dismally.

Life calls the tune, we dance.

Men are in fact, quite unable to control their own inventions; they at best develop adaptability to the new conditions those inventions create.

Youth to youth, like the dragon-flies chasing each other, and love like the sun warming them through and through.

The value of a sentiment is the amount of sacrifice you are prepared to make for it.

Only love makes fruitful the soul.

Society is built on marriage ... marriage and its consequences.

So this wonderful city
Has only dead ashes for me.

Love has no age, no limit; and no death.

Matters change and morals change; men remain.

Light-heartedness always made Soames suspicious - there was generally some reason for it.

Love could never come to full fruition till it was destroyed.

I am still under the impression that there is nothing alive quite so beautiful as a thoroughbred horse.

Headlines twice the size of the events.

If you do not think about your future, you cannot have one.

One's eyes are what one is, one's mouth is what one becomes.

Public opinion's always in advance of the law.

The law is what it is-a majestic edifice, sheltering all of us, each stone of which rests on another.

Justice is a machine that, when someone has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself. - John Galsworthy, Justice [1910], act II

Early morning does not mince words.

The biggest tragedy of life is the utter impossibility to change what you have done

Slang is vigorous and apt. Probably most of our vital words were once slang.

We are not living in a private world of our own. Everything we say and do and think has its effect on everything around us.

Summer - summer - summer! The soundless footsteps on the grass!