Quotes from John Galsworthy

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

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

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

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.

He might wish and wish and never get it - the beauty and the loving in the world!

The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy.

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

Love! Beyond meaure - beyond death - it nearly kills. But one wouldn't have been without it.

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

Youth to youth, like the dragon-flies chasing each other, and love like the sun warming them through and through.

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.

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

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.

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

And yet, in books were comfort and diversion; and they were wanted!

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!

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.

Memory heaps dead leaves on corpse-like deeds, from under which they do but vaguely offend the sense.

Really," said Winifred suddenly; "it almost seems like Fate. Only that's so old-fashioned.

Wishes father thought, but they don't breed evidence.

Youth, like a flame, burned ever in his breast, and to youth he turned, to the round little limbs, so reckless, that wanted care, to the small round faces so unreasonably solemn or bright, to the treble tongues, and the shrill, chuckling laughter, to the insistent tugging hands, and the feel of small bodies against his legs, to all that was young and young, and once more young.

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.

Only love makes fruitful the soul.

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.