Quotes from John Galsworthy

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

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

Beginnings are always messy.

Headlines twice the size of the events.

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

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

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

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

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

We are all familiar with the argument: Make war dreadful enough, and there will be no war. And we none of us believe it.

That "small" emotion, love, grows amazingly when threatened with extinction.

His natural taciturnity was in his favour; nothing could be more calculated to give people, especially people with property (Soames had no other clients), the impression that he was a safe man. And he was safe. [...] How could he fall, when his soul abhorred circumstances which render a fall possible - a man cannot fall off the floor!

Justice is a machine that, when someone has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself. - John Galsworthy, Justice [1910], act II

Take modern courtships! They resulted in the same thing as under George the Second, but took longer to reach it, owing to the motor-cycle and the standing lunch.

Curious how he jibbed away from sight of his wife and child! One would have thought he must have rushed up at the first moment. On the contrary, he had a sort of physical shrinking from it — fastidious possessor that he was. He was afraid of what Annette was thinking of him, author of her agonies, afraid of the look of the baby, afraid of showing his disappointment with the present and — the future.

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.

With the years his dislike of humbug had increased; the orthodoxy he had worn in the 'sixties', as he had worn side-whiskers out of sheer exuberance , had long dropped off, leaving him reverent before three things alone - beauty, upright conduct, and the sense of property; and the greatest of these now was beauty.

Swithin! And the fellow had gone and died, last November, at the age of seventy-nine, renewing the doubt whether Forsytes could live for ever, which had first arisen when Aunt Ann passed away.

Only those strong enough to keep silent about self are strong enough to be sure of self.

Zilele de naÅŸtere sunt - ca ÅŸi s?rb?torile Cr?ciunului - pline de decepÅ£ii. O veselie artificial?, confecÅ£ionat? din vreme, un revolver la tâmpl?, cu îndemnul: Dezl?nÅ£uie-te! Bucur?-te!

Love is no 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 color are always, wild!

He won't be happy till he gets it, said Michael, at last: The only thing is, you see, he doesn't know what IT is.

I loathe the idea of cutting down trees. Two hundred years of shape and energy all gone in half an hour. It's revolting.

Oh! isn't it stupid, the war?-as if it was not good to be alive. He wanted to say: You can't tell how good it is to be alive till you're facing death, because you don't live till then. And when a whole lot of you feel like that-and are ready to give their lives for each other, it's worth all the rest of life put together. But he couldn't get it out to this girl who believed in nothing.