Top 90 H. Rider Haggard Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “For deep love unsatisfied is the hell of noble hearts and a portion of the accursed, but love that is mirrored back more perfect from the soul of our desired doth fashion wings to lift us above ourselves, and makes us what we might be.”

— H. Rider Haggard

52. “Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and passed away to be forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This is but one of several; for Time eats up the works of man.”

— H. Rider Haggard

53. “Love to a woman is what the sun is to the world, it is her life, her animating principle, without which she must droop, and, if the plant be very tender, die. Except under its influence, a woman can never attain her full growth, never touch the height of her possibilities, or bloom into the plenitude of her moral beauty. A loveless marriage dwarfs our natures, a marriage where love is develops them to their utmost.”

— H. Rider Haggard

54. “The acorn of ambition often grows into an oak from which men hang.”

— H. Rider Haggard

55. “I let him run on awhile, reflecting to myself how easy we find it to be hard on the weaknesses of others, and how tender we are to our own.”

— H. Rider Haggard

56. “Vengeance is an arrow that in falling oft pierces him who shot it.”

— H. Rider Haggard

57. “Our future was so completely unknown, and I think that the unknown and the awful always bring a man nearer to his Maker.”

— H. Rider Haggard

58. “Life is not worth the trouble of life, except when one in love.”

— H. Rider Haggard

59. “What a tricky and uncomfortable thing is conscience, that nearly always begins to trouble us at the moment of, or after, the event, not before, when it might be of some use.”

— H. Rider Haggard

60. “The flesh dies, or at least it changes, and its passions pass, but that other passion of the spirit – that longing for oneness – is undying as itself.”

— H. Rider Haggard

61. “Laughter and bitterness are often the veils with which a sore heart wraps its weakness from the world.”

— H. Rider Haggard

62. “The law of England is much more severe upon offences against property than against the person, as becomes a people whose ruling passion is money.”

— H. Rider Haggard

63. “Be careful when power comes to thee also, lest thou too shouldst smite in thine anger or thy jealousy, for unconquerable strength is a sore weapon in the hands of erring man.”

— H. Rider Haggard

64. “Man doeth this and doeth that from the good or evil of his heart; but he knows not to what end his sense doth prompt him; for when he strikes he is blind to where the blow shall fall, nor can he count the airy threads that weave the web of circumstance. Good and evil, love and hate, night and day, sweet and bitter, man and woman, heaven above and the earth beneath – all those things are needful, one to the other, and who knows the end of each?”

— H. Rider Haggard

65. “I have noted that those who desire to do the most good often work the greatest harm.”

— H. Rider Haggard

66. “Heretofore my life has been calm as a summer’s day; but who knows when winter storms may rise, and often I have thought that I was born to know wind and rain and lightning as well as peace and sunshine.”

— H. Rider Haggard

67. “Then there came a vision to me, a vision that was sent in answer to my prayer, or, perchance, it was a madness born of my sorrows.”

— H. Rider Haggard

68. “Curse it!” said Good – for I am sorry to say he had a habit of using strong language when excited – contracted, no doubt, in the course of his nautical career; “curse it! I’ve killed him.”

— H. Rider Haggard

69. “When will man learn what was taught to him of old, that faith is the only plank wherewith he can float upon this sea and that his miserable works avail him nothing.”

— H. Rider Haggard

70. “When is truth pleasing? It is only when we clothe it’s nakedness with rags of imagination, or sweeten it with fiction, that it can please.”

— H. Rider Haggard

71. “It is a well-known fact that very often, putting the period of boyhood out of the argument, the older we grow the more cynical and hardened we become; indeed, many of us are only saved by timely death from moral petrification, if not from moral corruption.”

— H. Rider Haggard

72. “At the approach of evening we marched again, and, to cut a long story short, by daylight next morning found ourselves upon the lowest slopes of Sheba’s left breast, for which we had been steadily steering.”

— H. Rider Haggard

73. “Yet man dies not whilst the world, at once his mother and his monument, remains. His name is lost, indeed, but the breath he breathed still stirs the pine-tops on the mountains, the sound of the words he spoke yet echoes on through space; the thoughts his brain gave birth to we have inherited to-day; his passions are our cause of life; the joys and sorrows that he knew are our familiar friends – the end from which he fled aghast will surely overtake us also!”

— H. Rider Haggard

74. “Good responded nobly to this tax upon his inventive faculties. Never before had I the faintest conception of the breadth and depth and height of a naval officer’s objurgatory powers. For ten minutes he went on in several languages without stopping, and he scarcely ever repeated himself.”

— H. Rider Haggard

75. “Now,” I whispered. Boom! boom! boom! went the three heavy rifles, and down came Sir Henry’s elephant dead as a hammer, shot right through the heart.”

— H. Rider Haggard

76. “Yes,” I went on, “we do, indeed”; and again I smiled benignly, as I uttered that amazing lie. “We come to stay with you a little while, and to bless you by our sojourn. Ye will see, O friends, that I have prepared myself for this visit by the learning of your language.” “It is so, it is so,” said the chorus. “Only, my lord,” put in the old gentleman, “thou hast learnt it very badly.”

— H. Rider Haggard

77. “Now the western tempest was scrawled all over with lines of intolerable light, while the inky head of the cloud-giant to the east was continually suffused with a white and deadly glow that came and went in pulses, as though a blood of flame was being pumped into it from the heart of the storm.”

— H. Rider Haggard

78. “When we love most, and love happily, then we are at our topmost bent, and soar further above the earth than anything else can carry us.”

— H. Rider Haggard

79. “Take what life can give you, Ana, and do not trouble about the offerings which are laid in the tombs for time to crumble.”

— H. Rider Haggard

80. “Ah! If man would but see that hope is from within and not from without – that he himself must work out his own salvation.”

— H. Rider Haggard

81. “Whatever you are I never want to see you different,” he answered slowly. “To me you are most beautiful.”

— H. Rider Haggard

82. “I do not wish to preach, but perhaps, after all, this terrible misfortune may lead you to something better. Thank God, there is forgiveness for us all.”

— H. Rider Haggard

83. “They knew nothing of it in England or all the Western countries in those days before Crecy was fought, when the third Edward sat upon the throne. There was none to tell them of the doom that the East, whence come light and life, death and the decrees of God, had loosed upon the world. Not one in a multitude in Europe had ever even heard of those.”

— H. Rider Haggard

84. “The unknown is generally taken to be terrible, not as the proverb would infer, from the inherent superstition of man, but because it so often is terrible. He who would tamper with the vast and secret forces that animate the world may well fall a victim to them.”

— H. Rider Haggard

85. “Strange are the pictures of the future that mankind can thus draw with this brush of faith and these many-coloured pigments of the imagination! Strange, too, that no one of them tallies with another!”

— H. Rider Haggard

86. “Who and what was Ayesha, nay, what is Ayesha? An incarnate essence, a materialised spirit of Nature the unforeseeing, the lovely, the cruel and the immortal; ensouled alone, redeemable only by Humanity and its piteous sacrifice? Say you! I have done with speculations who depart to solve these mysteries.”

— H. Rider Haggard

87. “Thus it would seem that Ayesha, great tormented soul, thinking to win life and love eternal and most glorious, was in truth but another blind Pandora. From her stolen casket of beauty and super-human power had leapt into her bosom, there to dwell unceasingly, a hundred torturing demons, of whose wings mere mortal kind do but feel the far-off, icy shadowing.”

— H. Rider Haggard

88. “It is far. But there is no journey upon this earth that a man may not make if he sets his heart to it. There is nothing, Umbopa, that he cannot do, there are no mountains he may not climb, there are no deserts he cannot cross; save a mountain and a a desert of which you are spared the knowledge, if love leads him and he holds his life in his hand counting it as nothing, ready to keep it or to lose it as Providence may order.”

— H. Rider Haggard

89. “Fragrant was Ayesha’s breath as roses, the odour of roses clung to her lovely hair; her sweet body gleamed like some white sea-pearl; a faint but palpable radiance crowned her head; no sculptor ever fashioned such a marvel as the arm with which she held her veil about her; no stars in heaven ever shone more purely bright than did her calm, entranced eyes.”

— H. Rider Haggard

90. “It is far. But there is no journey upon this earth that a man may not make if he sets his heart to it.”

— H. Rider Haggard

91. “Never attack the strong until you are stronger.”

— H. Rider Haggard

92. “Love her who is present, for be sure she who is absent is false to thee;.”

— H. Rider Haggard

93. “Man’s cleverness is almost indefinite, and stretches like an elastic band, but human nature is like an iron ring.”

— H. Rider Haggard