"I dont know much about morality and that, but there is this: Its always worth while before you do anything to consider whether its going to hurt another person more than is absolutely necessary."
John Galsworthy was an English novelist and playwright. He is best known for his trilogy of novels collectively called The Forsyte Saga, and two later trilogies, A Modern Comedy and End of the Chapter. He was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Literature.
"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!"
"Justice is a machine that, when someone has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself."
"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!"
"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."
"It isnt enough to love people because theyre good to you, or because in some way or other youre going to get something by it. We have to love because we love loving."
"To take life," went on the old man in a voice which, though charged with strong emotion, seemed to be speaking to itself, "was the chief mark of the insensate barbarism still prevailing in those days. It sprang from that most irreligious fetish, the belief in the permanence of the individual ego after death. From the worship of that fetish had come all the sorrows of the human race. … They did not stop to love each other in this life; they were so sure they had all eternity to do it in. The doctrine was an invention to enable men to act like dogs with clear consciences. Love could never come to full fruition till it was destroyed."