JOHN GALSWORTHY

If you do not think about your future, you cannot have one.

There is one rule for politicians all over the world: Don't say in Power what you say in opposition; if you do, you only have to carry out what the other fellows have found impossible.

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

Beginnings are always messy.

The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy.

Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.

Headlines twice the size of the events.

Religion was nearly dead because there was no longer real belief in future life; but something was struggling to take its place - service - social service - the ants creed, the bees creed.

One's eyes are what one is, one's mouth is what one becomes.

The French cook; we open tins.

He was afflicted by the thought that where Beauty was, nothing ever ran quite straight, which no doubt, was why so many people looked on it as immoral.

When Man evolved Pity, he did a queer thing - deprived himself of the power of living life as it is without wishing it to become something different.

A man is the sum of his actions, of what he has done, of what he can do, Nothing else.

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

Humanism is the creed of those who believe that in the circle of enwrapping mystery, men's fates are in their own hands—a faith that for modern man is becoming the only possible faith.

Public opinion is always in advance of the law.

Events are as much the parents of the future as they were the children of the past.

… like most men with but little courage, he sought at once to justify himself by bullying.

… all experience tended to show that a man must die; and whether he died of a miserable old age in his own country, or prematurely of damp in the bottom of a foreign mine, was surely of little consequence, provided that by a change in his mode of life he benefited the British Empire.

Summer — summer — summer! The soundless footsteps on the grass!

Wealth is a means to an end, not the end itself. As a synonym for health and happiness, it has had a fair trial and failed dismally.

How to save the old that's worth saving, whether in landscape, houses, manners, institutions, or human types, is one of our greatest problems, and the one that we bother least about.

Matters change and morals change; men remain.

Once admit that we have the right to inflict unnecessary suffering and you destroy the very basis of human society.