Top 75 Quotes & Sayings by John Galsworthy

The French cook; we open tins.

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

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.

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

Headlines twice the size of the events.

Religion was nearly dead because there was no longer real belief in future life; but something was struggling to take its place - service - social service - the ants creed, the bees creed.

Beginnings are always messy.

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

There is one rule for politicians all over the world: Don't say in Power what you say in opposition; if you do, you only have to carry out what the other fellows have found impossible.

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

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

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

The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy.

He was afflicted by the thought that where Beauty was, nothing ever ran quite straight, which no doubt, was why so many people looked on it as immoral.

Beauty means this to one person, perhaps, and that to the other. And yet when any one of us has seen or heard or read that which to us is beautiful, we have known an emotion which is in every case the same in kind, if not in degree; an emotion precious and uplifting.

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

Public opinion's always in advance of the law.

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.

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

Honesty of thought and speech and written word is a jewel, and they who curb prejudice and seek honorably to know and speak the truth are the only builders of a better life.

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

Only love makes fruitful the soul.

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

The young man who, at the end of September, 1924, dismounted from a taxicab in South Square, Westminster, was so unobtrusively American that his driver had some hesitation in asking for double his fare. The young man had no hesitation in refusing it.

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

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

It isnot good enough tospend time and ink indescribing the penultimate sensations and physical movements of people getting into a state of rut, we all know them so well.

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

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

There are moments when Nature reveals the passion hidden beneath the careless calm of her ordinary moods-violent spring flashing white on almond-blossom through the purple clouds; a snowy, moonlit peak, with its single star, soaring up to the passionate blue; or against the flames of sunset, an old yew-tree standing dark guardian of some fiery secret.

It is by muteness that a dog becomes for one so utterly beyond value; with him one is at peace, where words play no torturing tricks.Those are the moments that I think are precious to a dog-when, with his adoring soul coming through his eyes, he feels that you are really thinking of him.

Early morning does not mince words.

How to save the old that's worth saving, whether in landscape, houses, manners, institutions, or human types, is one of our greatest problems, and the one that we bother least about.

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.

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!

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.

Life calls the tune, we dance.

Matters change and morals change; men remain.

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

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

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

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

When a Forsyte was engaged, married, or born, the Forsytes were present; when a Forsyte diedbut 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 vitalised persons who resent encroachments on their property.

Come! Let us lay a lance in rest, And tilt at windmills under a wild sky! For who would live so petty and unblest That dare not tilt at something ere he die; Rather than, screened by safe majority, Preserve his little life to little end, And never raise a rebel cry!

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

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

The bicycle... has been responsible for more movement in manners and morals than anything since Charles the Second. Under its influence, wholly or in part, have blossomed weekends, strong nerves, strong legs, strong language... equality of sex, good digestion and professional occupation - in four words, the emanicipation of women.

Art is the one form of human energy in the whole world, which really works for union, and destroys the barriers between man and man. It is the continual, unconscious replacement, however fleeting, of oneself by another; the real cement of human life; the everlasting refreshment and renewal. For, what is grievous, dompting, grim, about our lives is that we are shut up within ourselves, with an itch to get outside ourselves. And to be stolen away from ourselves by Art is a momentary relaxation from that itching, a minute's profound, and as it were secret, enfranchisement.

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

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

It isn't enough to love people because they're good to you, or because in some way or other you're going to get something by it. We have to love because we love loving.

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

It is an age of stir and change, a season of new wine and old bottles. Yet, assuredly, in spite of breakages and waste, a wine worth the drinking is all the time being made.

The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy, the building of a house, the writing of a novel, the demolition of a bridge, and, eminently, the finish of a voyage.

There are houses whose souls have passed into the limbo of Time, leaving their bodies in the limbo of London. Such was not quite the condition of Timothy's on the Bayswater Road, for Timothy's soul still had one foot in Timothy Forsyte's body, and Smither kept the atmosphere unchanging, of camphor and port wine and house whose windows are only opened to air it twice a day.

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

Justice is a machine that, when some one has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself.

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.

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

Humanism is the creed of those who believe that in the circle of enwrapping mystery, men's fates are in their own hands - a faith that for modern man is becoming the only possible faith.