H. Rider Haggard Quotes

. . . if you live long enough, you will learn that this world is full of deceptions

. . . is there anything so mighty as water in the world, I wonder

Superstition is still king of most of the world, though often it calls itself Religion.

. . . we are all fools in our different ways, and how can any one dig out of his heart the folly that his mother put there before he was born?

. . . there is a way out of most difficulties if only it can be hit upon.

While we breathe there is hope, and all that seems lost still may be won

. . . these priests, after the fashion of priests all the world over, now aspired to the absolute rule of the race

So kick away the burning sticks from beneath the water of your anger and let it cease from boiling, and go forth as you have promised, to see wonderful things and do wonderful deeds and snatch the pure and innocent out of the hands of evil gods or men.

. . . all men are cowards . . . in one matter or another, though in the rest they may be brave enough.

. . . there are always plenty of fools in the world and the fool who comes after is just as big as the fool who went before. Death spills the water of wisdom upon the sand . . . and sand is thirsty stuff that soon grows dry again. If it were not so . . . men would soon stop falling in love with women, and yet even great ones . . . fall in love.

. . . the dead keep their wisdom to themselves

. . . the extreme of unmorality is as fascinating to study as the extreme virtue and often more so.

Bethink you, have there not been days, aye and months, in your own life when you would have rejoiced to sleep in mindlessness? And should we not, perchance, be happier, all of us, if like the beasts we could not remember, foreknow and understand? Oh! men talk of Heaven, but believe me, the real Heaven is one of dreamless sleep, since life and wakefulness, however high their scale and on whatever star, mean struggle, which being so oft mistaken, must breed sorrow—or remorse that spoils all.

It is only the nervous that climb the highest points of anything, and this is true of fights as of all others.

Yet it is true that sun and moon and earth are born of the same black womb of chaos. Therefore in the beginning they were identical, as doubtless they will be in the end when, their journeyings done, they rush together to light space with a flame at which the mocking gods that made them may warm their hands. Well, so it is with men, . . . whose soul-stuff is drawn from the gulf of Spirit by Nature’s hand, and, cast upon the cold air of this death-driven world, freezes into a million shapes each different to the other and yet, be sure, the same.