T. H. White Quotes
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My boy, you shall be everything in the world, animal, vegetable, mineral, protista, or virus, for all I care-before I have done with you-but you will have to trust my superior backsight. The time is not yet ripe for you to be a hawk... so you may as well sit down for the moment and learn to be a human being.
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The bravest people are the ones who don’t mind looking like cowards.
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I think I ought to have some eddication,"said the Wart, "I can't think of anything to do.
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...All endeavours which are directed to a purely worldly end...contain within themselves the germs of their own corruption.
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It is the bad people who need to have principles to restrain them.
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The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment.
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Those who lived by the sword were forced to die by it.
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A chaos of mind and body - a time for weeping at sunsets and at the glamour of moonlight - a confusion and profusion of beliefs and hopes, in God, in Truth, in Love, and in Eternity - an ability to be transported by the beauty of physical objects - a heart to ache or swell- a joy so hoyful and a sorrow so sorrowful that oceans could lie between them.
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The miracle was that he had been allowed to do a miracle. And ever, says Mallory, Sir Lancelot wept, as he had been a child that had been beaten.
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If it takes a million years for a fish to become a reptile, has Man, in our few hundred, altered out of recognition?
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Middle-aged people can balance between believing in God and breaking all the commandments without difficulty.
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The word "feral" has a kind of magic potency which allied itself to two other words, "ferocious" and "free." To revert to a feral state!
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It seems, in tragedy, that innocence is not enough.
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Jenny, all my life I have wanted to do miracles. I have wanted to be holy. I suppose it was ambition or pride or some other unworthy thing. It was not enough for me to conquer the world--I wanted to conquer heaven too.
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It is a pity that there are no big creatures to prey on humanity. If there were enough dragons and rocs, perhaps mankind would turn its might against them. Unfortunately man is preyed upon by microbes, which are too small to be appreciated.
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Kings can only use their best tools.
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There were thousands of brown books in leather bindings, some chained to the book-shelves and others propped against each other as if they had had too much to drink and did not really trust themselves. These gave out a smell of must and solid brownness which was most secure.
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I am an anarchist, like any other sensible person. ~ Merlyn
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The fate of this man or that man was less than a drop, although it was a sparkling one, in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea.
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It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible.
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You run a grave risk, my boy," said the magician, "of being turned into a piece of bread, and toasted.
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[Kay] was not at all an unpleasant person really, but clever, quick, proud, passionate and ambitious. He was one of those people who would be neither a follower nor a leader, but only an aspiring heart, impatient in the failing body which imprisoned it.
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"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails.
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Is there anything more terrible than perpetual motion, than doing and doing and doing, without a reason, without a consciousness, without a change, without an end?