John Galsworthy Quotations

Justice is a machine which, when someone has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself.

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.

He might wish and wish and never get it - the beauty and the loving in the world!

I drink the wine of aspiration and the drug of illusion. Thus I am never dull.

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

Come! Let us lay a lance in rest, And tilt at windmills under a wild sky! For who would live so petty and unblest That dare not tilt at something ere he die; Rather than, screened by safe majority, Preserve his little life to little end, And never raise a rebel cry!

The French cook; we open tins.

Matters change and morals change; men remain.

Art is the one form of human energy in the whole world, which really works for union, and destroys the barriers between man and man. It is the continual, unconscious replacement, however fleeting, of oneself by another; the real cement of human life; the everlasting refreshment and renewal. For, what is grievous, dompting, grim, about our lives is that we are shut up within ourselves, with an itch to get outside ourselves. And to be stolen away from ourselves by Art is a momentary relaxation from that itching, a minute's profound, and as it were secret, enfranchisement.

Only love makes fruitful the soul.