John Galsworthy Quotes

CAST OF THE FIRST PRODUCTION AT THE DUKE OF YORK’S THEATRE, FEBRUARY 21, 1910 James How MR. SYDNEY VALENTINE Walter How MR. CHARLES MAUDE Cokeson MR. EDMUND GWENN Falder MR. DENNIS EADIE The Office-boy MR. GEORGE HERSEE The Detective MR. LESLIE CARTER The Cashier MR. C. E. VERNON The Judge MR. DION BOUCICAULT The Old Advocate MR. OSCAR ADYE The Young Advocate MR. CHARLES BRYANT The Prison Governor MR. GRENDON BENTLEY The Prison Chaplain MR. HUBERT HARBEN The Prison Doctor MR. LEWIS CASSON Wooder MR. FREDERICK LLOYD Moaney MR. ROBERT PATEMAN Clipton MR. O. P. HEGGIE O’Cleary MR. WHITFORD KANE Ruth Honeywill Miss EDYTH OLIVE

Love has no age, no limit, and no death.

rubbish that sells is not rubbish at all – far from it

A NUMBER OF BARRISTERS, SOLICITERS, SPECTATORS, USHERS, REPORTERS, JURYMEN, WARDERS, AND PRISONERS TIME: The Present. ACT I. The office of James and Walter How. Morning. July. ACT II. Assizes. Afternoon. October. ACT III. A prison. December. SCENE I. The Governor’s office. SCENE II. A corridor. SCENE III. A cell. ACT IV. The office of James and Walter How. Morning. March, two years later.

And while they walked Jolyon pondered those words: 'I hope you'll treat him as you treated me.' That would depend on himself. Could he trust himself? Did nature permit a Forsyte not to make a slave of what he adored? Could beauty be confided to him? Or should she not just be a visitor, coming when she would, possessed for moments which passed, to return only at her own choosing? 'We are a breed of spoilers!' thought Jolyon, 'close and greedy; the bloom of life is not safe with us. Let her come to me as she will, when she will, not at all if she will not. Let me be just her stand-by, her perching-place; never her cage!

...that secret hostility natural between brothers, the roots of which — little nursery rivalries — sometimes toughen and deepen as life goes on, and, all hidden, support a plant capable of producing in season the bitterest fruits.

Here’s a sentence in a book I’m reading: ‘We belong, of course, to a generation that’s seen through things, seen how futile everything is, and had the courage to accept futility, and say to ourselves: There’s nothing for it but to enjoy ourselves as best we can.’ Well, I suppose that’s my generation, the one that’s seen the war and its aftermath; and, of course, it is the attitude of quite a crowd; but when you come to think of it, it might have been said by any rather unthinking person in any generation; certainly might have been said by the last generation after religion had got the knock that Darwin gave it. For what does it come to? Suppose you admit having seen through religion and marriage and treaties, and commercial honesty and freedom and ideals of every kind, seen that there’s nothing absolute about them, that they lead of themselves to no definite reward, either in this world or a next which doesn’t exist perhaps, and that the only thing absolute is pleasure and that you mean to have it — are you any farther towards getting pleasure? No! you’re a long way farther off. If everybody’s creed is consciously and crudely ‘grab a good time at all costs,’ everybody is going to grab it at the expense of everybody else, and the devil will take the hindmost, and that’ll be nearly everybody, especially the sort of slackers who naturally hold that creed, so that they, most certainly, aren’t going to get a good time. All those things they’ve so cleverly seen through are only rules of the road devised by men throughout the ages to keep people within bounds, so that we may all have a reasonable chance of getting a good time, instead of the good time going only to the violent, callous, dangerous and able few. All our institutions, religion, marriage, treaties, the law, and the rest, are simply forms of consideration for others necessary to secure consideration for self. Without them we should be a society of feeble motor-bandits and streetwalkers in slavery to a few super

The value of a sentiment is the amount of sacrifice you are prepared to make for it.

And if heroic figures, in days that never were, seem to startle out from their surroundings in fashion unbecoming to a Forsyte of the Victorian era, we may be sure that tribal instinct was even then the prime force, and that ‘family’ and the sense of home and property counted as they do to this day, for all the recent efforts to ‘talk them out.

Words have as little relation to fact and feeling as coin to the bread it buys.

FROME. What was the nature of your relations with him? RUTH. We were friends. THE JUDGE. Friends? RUTH. [Simply] Lovers, sir. THE JUDGE. [Sharply] In what sense do you use that word? RUTH. We love each other.

inquiry of Jack Cardigan: ‘What’s the use of keepin’ fit?’ or, more simply, to the fact that he was a foreigner, or alien as it was now called.

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

My friend has alluded to the “romantic glamour” with which I have sought to invest this case. Gentlemen, I have done nothing of the kind. I have merely shown you the background of “life” — that palpitating life which, believe me — whatever my friend may say — always lies behind the commission of a crime. Now gentlemen, we live in a highly, civilized age, and the sight of brutal violence disturbs us in a very strange way, even when we have no personal interest in the matter. But when we see it inflicted on a woman whom we love — what then?

SIR CHARLES is an upright, well-groomed, grey-moustached, red-faced man of sixty-seven, with a keen eye for molehills, and none at all for mountains.