Top 70 John Galsworthy Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Love has no age, no limit; and no death.”

— John Galsworthy

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

— John Galsworthy

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

— John Galsworthy

4. “Not the least hard thing to bear when they go from us, these quiet friends, is that they carry away with them so many years of our own lives.”

— John Galsworthy

5. “Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem.”

— John Galsworthy

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

— John Galsworthy

7. “By the cigars they smoke, and the composers they love, ye shall know the texture of men’s souls.”

— John Galsworthy

8. “It’s not life that counts but the fortitude you bring into it.”

— John Galsworthy

9. “Beginnings are always messy.”

— John Galsworthy

10. “Justice is a machine which, when someone has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself.”

— John Galsworthy

11. “I am still under the impression that there is nothing alive quite so beautiful as a thoroughbred horse.”

— John Galsworthy

12. “Love could never come to full fruition till it was destroyed.”

— John Galsworthy

13. “Life calls the tune, we dance.”

— John Galsworthy

14. “Only love makes fruitful the soul.”

— John Galsworthy

15. “Dreaming is the poetry of Life, and we must be forgiven if we indulge in it a little.”

— John Galsworthy

16. “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.”

— John Galsworthy

17. “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.”

— John Galsworthy

18. “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.”

— John Galsworthy

19. “Beauty means this to one person, perhaps, and that to the other. And yet when any one of us has seen or heard or read that which to us is beautiful, we have known an emotion which is in every case the same in kind, if not in degree; an emotion precious and uplifting.”

— John Galsworthy

20. “Headlines twice the size of the events.”

— John Galsworthy

21. “The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy.”

— John Galsworthy

22. “As a man lives and thinks, so he will write.”

— John Galsworthy

23. “The law is what it is-a majestic edifice, sheltering all of us, each stone of which rests on another.”

— John Galsworthy

24. “One’s eyes are what one is, one’s mouth is what one becomes.”

— John Galsworthy

25. “It isn’t enough to love people because they’re good to you, or because in some way or other you’re going to get something by it. We have to love because we love loving.”

— John Galsworthy

26. “I drink the wine of aspiration and the drug of illusion. Thus I am never dull.”

— John Galsworthy

27. “The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy, the building of a house, the writing of a novel, the demolition of a bridge, and, eminently, the finish of a voyage.”

— John Galsworthy

28. “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.”

— John Galsworthy

29. “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.”

— John Galsworthy

30. “Early morning does not mince words.”

— John Galsworthy

31. “Honesty of thought and speech and written word is a jewel, and they who curb prejudice and seek honorably to know and speak the truth are the only builders of a better life.”

— John Galsworthy

32. “Slang is vigorous and apt. Probably most of our vital words were once slang.”

— John Galsworthy

33. “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.”

— John Galsworthy

34. “Love! Beyond meaure – beyond death – it nearly kills. But one wouldn’t have been without it.”

— John Galsworthy

35. “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.”

— John Galsworthy

36. “Essential characteristics of a gentleman: The will to put himself in the place of others; the horror of forcing others into positions from which he would himself recoil; and the power to do what seems to him to be right without considering what others may say or think.”

— John Galsworthy

37. “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.”

— John Galsworthy

38. “Dawn has power to fertilise the most matter-of-fact vision.”

— John Galsworthy

39. “Men are in fact, quite unable to control their own inventions; they at best develop adaptability to the new conditions those inventions create.”

— John Galsworthy

40. “I think the greatest thing in the world is to believe in people.”

— John Galsworthy

41. “Public opinion’s always in advance of the law.”

— John Galsworthy

42. “Memory heaps dead leaves on corpse-like deeds, from under which they do but vaguely offend the sense.”

— John Galsworthy

43. “Politics are popularly supposed to govern the direction, and statesmen to be the guardian angels, of Civilization. It seems to me that they have little or no power over its growth. They are of it, and move with it. Their concern is rather with the body than with the mind or soul of a nation. One needs not to be an engineer to know that to pull a man up a wall one must be higher than he; that to raise general taste one must have better taste than that of those whose taste he is raising.”

— John Galsworthy

44. “We are all familiar with the argument: Make war dreadful enough, and there will be no war. And we none of us believe it.”

— John Galsworthy

45. “Youth, like a flame, burned ever in his breast, and to youth he turned, to the round little limbs, so reckless, that wanted care, to the small round faces so unreasonably solemn or bright, to the treble tongues, and the shrill, chuckling laughter, to the insistent tugging hands, and the feel of small bodies against his legs, to all that was young and young, and once more young.”

— John Galsworthy

46. “It isnot good enough tospend time and ink indescribing the penultimate sensations and physical movements of people getting into a state of rut, we all know them so well.”

— John Galsworthy

47. “He might wish and wish and never get it – the beauty and the loving in the world!”

— John Galsworthy

48. “Matters change and morals change; men remain.”

— John Galsworthy

49. “See what perils do environ those who meddle with hot iron.”

— John Galsworthy

50. “The young man who, at the end of September, 1924, dismounted from a taxicab in South Square, Westminster, was so unobtrusively American that his driver had some hesitation in asking for double his fare. The young man had no hesitation in refusing it.”

— John Galsworthy