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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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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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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Love of beauty is really only the sex instinct, which nothing but complete union satisfies.
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One's eyes are what one is, one's mouth is what one becomes.
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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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Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.
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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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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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Love has no age, no limit; and no death.
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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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A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.
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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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The French cook; we open tins.
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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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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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Love! Beyond measure - beyond death - it nearly kills. But one wouldn't have been without it.
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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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Public opinion's always in advance of the law.
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The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy.
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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.
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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.
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The value of a sentiment is the amount of sacrifice you are prepared to make for it.