John Galsworthy > Quotes

“Life calls the tune, we dance.”
― John Galsworthy

“It was such a spring day as breathes into a man an ineffable yearning, a painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand motionless, looking at the leaves or grass, and fling out his arms to embrace he knows not what.”
― John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga

“Love is not a hot-house flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine; sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance within the hedge of our gardens, we call a flower; and when it blooms outside we call a weed; but, flower or weed, whose scent and colour are always, wild!”
― John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga

“Beauty means this to one person, perhaps, and that to another. And yet when any one of us has seen or heard or read that which to him is beautiful, he has known an emotion which is in every case the same in kind, if not in degree; an emotion precious and uplifting. A choirboy's voice, a ship in sail, an opening flower, a town at night, the song of the blackbird, a lovely poem, leaf shadows, a child's grace, the starry skies, a cathedral, apple trees in spring, a thorough-bred horse, sheep-bells on a hill, a rippling stream, a butterfly, the crescent moon -- the thousand sights or sounds or words that evoke in us the thought of beauty -- these are the drops of rain that keep the human spirit from death by drought. They are a stealing and a silent refreshment that we perhaps do not think about but which goes on all the time....It would surprise any of us if we realized how much store we unconsciously set by beauty, and how little savour there would be left in life if it were withdrawn. It is the smile on the earth's face, open to all, and needs but the eyes to see, the mood to understand.”
― John Galsworthy

“One's eyes are what one is, one's mouth is what one becomes.”
― John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga

“the biggest tragedy of life is the utter impossibility to change what you have done”
― John Galsworthy

“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.”
― John Galsworthy

“Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem. ”
― John Galsworthy

“Love has no age, no limit; and no death.”
― John Galsworthy

“He might wish and wish and never get it - the beauty and the loving in the world!”
― John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga

“The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy.”
― John Galsworthy

“Dreaming is the poetry of Life, and we must be forgiven if we indulge in it a little.”
― John Galsworthy, Five Speeches to P.E.N. Clubs and a Letter

“Love! Beyond meaure - beyond death - it nearly kills. But one wouldn't have been without it.”
― John Galsworthy

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

“When a Forsyte was engaged, married, or born, the Forsytes were present; when a Forsyte died — but no Forsyte had as yet died; they did not die; death being contrary to their principles, they took precautions against it, the instinctive precautions of highly vitalized persons who resent encroachments on their property.”
― John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga

“Youth to youth, like the dragon-flies chasing each other, and love like the sun warming them through and through.”
― John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga

“Men are in fact, quite unable to control their own inventions; they at best develop adaptability to the new conditions those inventions create.”
― John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga

“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.”
― John Glasworthy

“Light-heartedness always made Soames suspicious - there was generally some reason for it.”
― John Galsworthy, The White Monkey

“She stood for a moment looking up at the stars, so far, so many, bright and cold. And with a faint smile she thought: ‘I wonder which is my lucky star!”
― John Galsworthy, Flowering Wilderness

“An epoch which had gilded individual liberty so that if a man had money he was free in law and fact, and if he had not money he was free in law and not in fact. An era which had canonized hypocrisy, so that to seem to be respectable was to be.”
― John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga

“And yet, in books were comfort and diversion; and they were wanted!”
― John Galsworthy, The White Monkey

“Wishes father thought, but they don't breed evidence.”
― John Galsworthy

“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.”
― John Galsworthy, The White Monkey

“In choosing, moreover, for his father an amiable man of fifty-two, who had already lost an only son, and for his mother a woman of thirty-eight, whose first and only child he was, little Jon had done well and wisely. What had saved him from becoming a cross between a lap dog and a little prig, had been his father's adoration of his mother, for even little Jon could see that she was not merely just his mother, and that he played second fiddle to her in his father's heart: What he played in his mother's heart he knew not yet.”
― John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga

“To give the devil its due, ours is the best Age men ever lived in; we are all more comfortable and virtuous than we ever were; we have many new accomplishments, advertisements in green pastures, telephones in bedrooms, more newspapers than we want to read, and extremely punctilious diagnosis of maladies. A doctor examined a young lady the other day, and among his notes were there: ‘Not afraid of small rooms, ghosts, or thunderstorms – not made drunk by hearing Wagner; brown hair, artistic hands; had a craving for chocolate in 1918.”
― John Galsworthy, Candelabra: Selected Essays and Addresses

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

“Memory heaps dead leaves on corpse-like deeds, from under which they do but vaguely offend the sense.”
― John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga

“Politics are popularly supposed to govern the direction, and statesmen to be the guardian angels, of Civilization. It seems to me that they have little or no power over its growth. They are of it, and move with it. Their concern is rather with the body than with the mind or soul of a nation. One needs not to be an engineer to know that to pull a man up a wall one must be higher than he; that to raise general taste one must have better taste than that of those whose taste he is raising.”
― John Galsworthy, Candelabra: Selected Essays and Addresses

“Really," said Winifred suddenly; "it almost seems like Fate. Only that's so old-fashioned.”
― John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga