John Galsworthy Quotes

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.

We are not living in a private world of our own. Everything we say and do and think has its effect on everything around us.

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!

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!

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

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."

In choosing, moreover, for his father an amiable man of fifty-two, who had already lost an only son, and for his mother a woman of thirty-eight, whose first and only child he was, little Jon had done well and wisely. What had saved him from becoming a cross between a lap dog and a little prig, had been his father's adoration of his mother, for even little Jon could see that she was not merely just his mother, and that he played second fiddle to her in his father's heart: What he played in his mother's heart he knew not yet.

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.

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

There are two irreconcilable ideas of God. There′s the Unknowable Creative Principle — -one believes in That. And there′s the Sum of altruism in man — -naturally one believes in That...The sublime poem of the Christ life was man′s attempt to join those two irreconcilable conceptions of God. And since the Sum of human altruism was as much a part of the Unknowable Creative Principle as anything else in Nature and the Universe, a worse link might have been chosen after all! Funny — -how one went through life without seeing it in that sort of way!