John Galsworthy quotes - page 2

Public is a mechanical and helpless consumer at the mercy of what is supplied to it. (John Galsworthy)
A man is the sum of his actions, of what he has done, of what he can do, Nothing else. View quote
John Galsworthy
Only love makes fruitful the soul. View quote
John Galsworthy
The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy. View quote
John Galsworthy
It was such a spring day as breathes into a man an ineffable yearning, a painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand motionless, looking at the leaves or grass, and fling out his arms to embrace he knows not what. View quote
John Galsworthy
Everything known before it happens; and headlines twice the size of the events. View quote
John Galsworthy
Life was to be lived - not torpidly dozed through in this queer cultured place, where age was in the blood! Life was for love - to be enjoyed! View quote
John Galsworthy
I paused, watching the swallows; for they seemed to me the symbol, in their swift, sure curvetting, all daring and balance and surprise, of the delicate poise and motion of Art, that visits no two men alike, in a world where no two things of all the things there be, are quite the same. View quote
John Galsworthy
Men fall, roughly speaking, into two flocks: Those whose intelligence is uninquiring in the face of Art, and does not demand to be appeased before their emotions can be stirred; and those who, having a speculative bent of mind, must first be satisfied by an enlightening quality in a work of Art, before that work of Art can awaken in them feeling. The audience of the realist is drawn from this latter type of man; the much larger audience of the romantic artist from the former; together with, in both cases, those fastidious few for whom all Art is style and only style, and who welcome either kind, so long as it is good enough. View quote
John Galsworthy
The seeing of things as they really are - the seeing of a proportion veiled from other eyes (together with the power of expression), is what makes a man an artist. What makes him a great artist is a high fervour of spirit, which produces a superlative, instead of a comparative, clarity of vision. View quote
John Galsworthy
I sat, just watching the moon creep up, and hearing the thin, dry rustle of the leaves along the holly hedge. And there came to me this thought: What is this Universe - that never had beginning and will never have an end - but a myriad striving to perfect pictures never the same, so blending and fading one into another, that all form one great perfected picture? And what are we - ripples on the tides of a birthless, deathless, equipoised Creative-Purpose - but little works of Art? (John Galsworthy)
Only out of stir and change is born new salvation. To deny that is to deny belief in man, to turn our backs on courage! View quote
John Galsworthy
It is an age of stir and change, a season of new wine and old bottles. Yet, assuredly, in spite of breakages and waste, a wine worth the drinking is all the time being made. View quote
John Galsworthy
The French cook; we open tins. View quote
John Galsworthy
I don't know much about morality and that, but there is this: It's always worth while before you do anything to consider whether it's going to hurt another person more than is absolutely necessary. View quote
John Galsworthy
I cannot explain. There are things that I can't make clear, because you are wilfully blind to all that I believe in. View quote
John Galsworthy
The world's a fine place for those who go out to take it; there's lots of unknown stuff in it yet. View quote
John Galsworthy
...making of good drama, as to the practice of every other art, there must be brought an almost passionate love of discipline, a white-heat of self-respect, a desire to make the truest, fairest, best thing in one's power; and that to these must be added an eye that does not flinch. View quote
John Galsworthy
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. View quote
John Galsworthy
Beginnings are always messy. View quote
John Galsworthy
Slowly, under our feet, beneath our consciousness, is forming that new philosophy, and it is in times of new philosophies that Art, itself in essence always a discovery, must flourish. (John Galsworthy)
He is but a poor philosopher who holds a view so narrow as to exclude forms not to his personal taste. View quote
John Galsworthy
Art is that imaginative expression of human energy, which, through technical concretion of feeling and perception, tends to reconcile the individual with the universal, by exciting in him impersonal emotion. View quote
John Galsworthy
Of all kinds of human energy, Art is surely the most free, the least parochial; and demands of us an essential tolerance of all its forms. Shall we waste breath and ink in condemnation of artists, because their temperaments are not our own? View quote
John Galsworthy
Raise up the banner of forlorn defence - A jest to the complacency of crowds - Bright-haloed with the one diviner sense: To hold itself as nothing to itself; And in the quest of its imagined star To lose all thought of after-recompense! View quote
John Galsworthy