Quotes from H. Rider Haggard

Truly wealth, which men spend all their lives in acquiring, is a valueless thing at the last.

The acorn of ambition often grows into an oak from which men hang.

I am not a nervous man in a general way, and very little troubled with superstitions, of which I have lived to see the folly.

It is awkward to listen to oneself being praised, and I was always a shy man.

The law of England is much more severe upon offences against property than against the person, as becomes a people whose ruling passion is money.

It is curious to look back and realize upon what trivial and apparently coincidental circumstances great events frequently turn as easily and naturally as a door on its hinges.

The Almighty gave us our lives, and I suppose He meant us to defend them, at least I have always acted on that, and I hope it will not be brought up against me when my clock strikes.

The food that memory gives to eat is bitter to the taste, and it is only with the teeth of hope that we can bear to bite it.

We run to place and power over the dead bodies of those who fail and fall; ay, we win the food we eat from out the mouths of starving babes.

Truly time should be measured by events, and not by the lapse of hours.

There are things and there are faces which, when felt or seen for the first time, stamp themselves upon the mind like a sun image on a sensitized plate and there remain unalterably fixed.

Men and women, empires and cities, thrones, principalities, and powers, mountains, rivers, and unfathomed seas, worlds, spaces, and universes, all have their day, and all must go.

Mistrust all men, and slay him whom thou mistrustest overmuch; and as for women, flee from them, for they are evil, and in the end will destroy thee.

She-who-must-be-obeyed.

All sorts of reflections of this nature passed through my mind—for as I grow older I regret to say that a detestable habit of thinking seems to be getting a hold of me...

Ah! If man would but see that hope is from within and not from without - that he himself must work out his own salvation.

My death is very near to me, and of this I am glad, for I desire to pursue the quest in other realms, as it has been promised to me that I shall do.

It is not wise to neglect the present for the future, for who knows what the future will be?