John Galsworthy

In sum, human civilization is the outgrowth of conscious altruism; and the directive Moral Purpose in the world nothing but our dim perception, ever growing through spiritual friction, that we are all bound more and more toward the …

Happiness lies in breadth of heart. And breadth of heart is that inward freedom which has the power to understand, feel with, and, if need be, help others.

This world (as all will admit) is one of the innumerable expressions of an Unknowable Creative Purpose, which colloquially we call God

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!

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,

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?

He is but a poor philosopher who holds a view so narrow as to exclude forms not to his personal taste.

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 …

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!

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.

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.

Art is the great and universal refreshment. For Art is never dogmatic; holds no brief for itself; you may take it, or you may leave it.

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 …

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 …

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. And the greatest Art is that …

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

Truth, to the human consciousness at least, is but that vitally just relation of part to whole which is the very condition of life itself. And the task before the imaginative writer, whether at the end of the last century or all these …

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

Public opinion's always in advance of the law.

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.

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

The balance between the sayings: 'Might is Right,' and 'Right is Might.' They're both half-truth, but the first was beating the other out of the field. All the rest of it is cant, you know.

I cannot explain. There are things that I can't make clear, because you are wilfully blind to all that I believe in.

Love of beauty is really only the sex instinct, which nothing but complete union satisfies.