John Galsworthy Quotes
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A man is the sum of his actions, of what he has done, of what he can do, Nothing else.
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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.
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Love of beauty is really only the sex instinct, which nothing but complete union satisfies.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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Art is that imaginative expression of human energy, which, through technical concretion of feeling and perception, tends to reconcile the individual with the universal, by exciting in him impersonal emotion. And the greatest Art is that which excites the greatest impersonal emotion in an hypothecated perfect human being.
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Justice is a machine that, when someone has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself.
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One's eyes are what one is, one's mouth is what one becomes.
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I don't know much about morality and that, but there is this: It's always worth while before you do anything to consider whether it's going to hurt another person more than is absolutely necessary.
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Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.
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If you do not think about your future, you cannot have one.
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The world's a fine place for those who go out to take it; there's lots of unknown stuff in it yet. I'll fill your lap, my pretty, so full of treasures that you shan't know yourself. A man wasn't meant to sit at home...
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Love has no age, no limit; and no death.
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I paused, watching the swallows; for they seemed to me the symbol, in their swift, sure curvetting, all daring and balance and surprise, of the delicate poise and motion of Art, that visits no two men alike, in a world where no two things of all the things there be, are quite the same.
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The seeing of things as they really are - the seeing of a proportion veiled from other eyes (together with the power of expression), is what makes a man an artist. What makes him a great artist is a high fervour of spirit, which produces a superlative, instead of a comparative, clarity of vision.
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Love! Beyond measure - beyond death - it nearly kills. But one wouldn't have been without it.
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The value of a sentiment is the amount of sacrifice you are prepared to make for it.
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A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.
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The French cook; we open tins.
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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.
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The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy.
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Headlines twice the size of the events.
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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.