Top 40 Lord Dunsany Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “A man is a very small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonders.”

— Lord Dunsany

2. “Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories.”

— Lord Dunsany

3. “Then I perceived, what I had never thought, that all these staring houses were not alike, but different one from another, because they held different dreams.”

— Lord Dunsany

4. “Humanity, let us say, is like people packed in a automobile which is traveling downhill without lights at a terrific speed and driven by a four-year-old child. The signposts along the way are all marked “progress.””

— Lord Dunsany

5. “Once I found out the secret of the universe. I have forgotten what it was, but I know that the Creator does not take Creation seriously, for I remember that He sat in Space with all His work in front of Him and laughed.”

— Lord Dunsany

6. “Everyone’s future is, in reality, uncertain and full of unknown treasures from which all may draw unguessed prizes.”

— Lord Dunsany

7. “Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities.”

— Lord Dunsany

8. “And you who sought for magic in your youth but desire it not in your age, know that there is a blindness of spirit which comes from age, more black than the blindness of eye, making a darkness about you across which nothing may be seen, or felt, or known, or in any way apprehended.”

— Lord Dunsany

9. “And she would not hold back his limbs when his heart was gone to the woods, for it is ever the way of witches with any two things to care for the more mysterious of the two.”

— Lord Dunsany

10. “How beautiful are dreams! In dreams the dead may live, even the long dead and the very silent.”

— Lord Dunsany

11. “It has always struck me that one of the readiest ways of estimating a country’s regard for law is to notice what arms the officers of the law are carrying: in England it is little batons, in France swords, in many countries revolvers, and in Russia the police used to have artillery.”

— Lord Dunsany

12. “It was the hour when gauze-winged insects are born that only live for a day.”

— Lord Dunsany

13. “I have lived to see that being seventeen is no protection against becoming seventy, but to know this needs the experience of a lifetime, for no imagination copes with it.”

— Lord Dunsany

14. “There is no beauty or romance or mystery in the sea except for the men that sail abroad upon it, and those who stay at home and dream of them.”

— Lord Dunsany

15. “All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making rafts upon doomed ships. When we break up under the heavy years and go down into eternity with all that is ours our thoughts like small lost rafts float on awhile upon Oblivion’s sea. They will not carry much over those tides, our names and a phrase or two and little else.”

— Lord Dunsany

16. “I think that travel comes from some deep urge to see the world, like the urge that brings up a worm in an Irish bog to see the moon when it is full.”

— Lord Dunsany

17. “Yet in the blood of man there is a tide, an old sea-current rather, that is somehow akin to the twilight, which brings him rumours of beauty from however far away, as driftwood is found at sea from islands not yet discovered: and this spring-tide or current that visits the blood of man comes from the fabulous quarter of his lineage, from the legendary, the old; it takes him out to the woodlands, out to the hills; he listens to ancient song.”

— Lord Dunsany

18. “Contrast is the dramatist’s method.”

— Lord Dunsany

19. “The fear of dogs is deep and universal amongst all that are less than Man.”

— Lord Dunsany

20. “Nothing is unobtainable to the sword.”

— Lord Dunsany

21. “Now it is thus with time in Elfland: in the eternal beauty that dreams in that honied air nothing stirs or fades or dies, nothing seeks its happiness in movement or change or a new thing, but has its ecstasy in the perpetual contemplation of all the beauty that has ever been, and which always glows over those enchanted lawns as intense as when first created by incantation or song.”

— Lord Dunsany

22. “To the end of his life he remained convinced of the high calling of the genuine artist, and he knew that artists must sometimes toil in obscurity, and in the face of prevailing public opinion.”

— Lord Dunsany

23. “On a waste place strewn with bricks in the outskirts of a town twilight was falling. A star or two appeared over the smoke, and distant windows lit mysterious lights. The stillness deepened and the loneliness. Then all the outcast things that are silent by day found voices.”

— Lord Dunsany

24. “Her feet half rested half floated, upon the floor; Earth scarcely held her down, so fast was she becoming a thing of dreams. No love of hers for Earth, or of the children of Earth for her, had any longer power to hold her there. And.”

— Lord Dunsany

25. “The years are going by us like huge birds, whom Doom and Destiny and the schemes of God have frightened up out of some old gray marsh.”

— Lord Dunsany

26. “And little he knew of the things that ink may do, how it can mark a dead man’s thought for the wonder of later years, and tell of happenings that are gone clean away, and be a voice for us out of the dark of time, and save many a fragile thing from the pounding of heavy ages; or carry to us, over the rolling centuries, even a song from lips long dead on forgotten hills.”

— Lord Dunsany

27. “Come with me, ladies and gentlemen who are in any wise weary of London: come with me: and those that tire at all of the world we know: for we have new worlds here.”

— Lord Dunsany

28. “There seemed to be a magic all round that fire of big logs quietly smouldering in the woods upon Autumn’s discarded robe that lay brilliant there; and it was not the magic of Elfland, nor had Ziroonderel called it up with her wand: it was only a magic of the wood’s very own. And.”

— Lord Dunsany

29. “Into that charm and the gloom and the deep silence Oth moved gravely; and a solemness came on his face as he entered the wood; for to go on quiet feet through the wood was the work of his life, and he came to it as men come to their heart’s desire.”

— Lord Dunsany

30. “There are loves that are each one the romance of a lifetime. Such a love must illumine the whole of a man’s memories and light up all his years. It goes down time like lightning through the air. The length of it in hours is not to be measured.”

— Lord Dunsany

31. “Then on the River I saw the dream-built ship of the god Yoharneth-Lehai, whose great prow lifted grey into the air above the River of Silence. Her timbers were olden dreams dreamed long ago, and poets’ fancies made her tall, straight masts, and her rigging was wrought out of the people’s hopes. Upon her deck were rowers with dream-made oars, and the rowers were the people of men’s fancies, and princes of old story and people who had died, and people who had never been.”

— Lord Dunsany

32. “Ivy dreams sullenly and alone of overthrowing the cities.”

— Lord Dunsany

33. “It is very seldom that the same man knows much of science, and about the things that were known before science came.”

— Lord Dunsany

34. “They were like some popular cry, some vehement fancy, that comes down on a page of history for a day, and passes, leaving no other record at all except those lines on one page. And.”

— Lord Dunsany

35. “They came as quietly as rain, and went away like mists drifting. There were jests about them and songs. And the songs outlasted the jests. At last they became a legend, which haunted those farms for ever: they were spoken of when men told of hopeless quests, and held up to laughter or glory, whichever men had to give. And.”

— Lord Dunsany

36. “Rodriguez, in addition to the pleasant glow in the mind that comes from a generous action, had another feeling that gives all of us pleasure, a feeling of increased safety; for while he had the ring upon his finger and Morano went unpaid the thought could not help occurring, even to a generous mind, that one of these windy nights Morano might come for his wages.”

— Lord Dunsany

37. “There are many men like this; they can form a plausible theory and grasp its logical points, but take it away from them and destroy it utterly before their eyes, and they will not so easily lash their tired brains at once to build another theory in place of the one that is ruined.”

— Lord Dunsany

38. “I heard a cry and awoke and found that I had dreamed, and looking out of my house into the street I found that a flash of lightning had killed a child. Then I knew that the gods still lived.”

— Lord Dunsany

39. “It is vey difficult to draw away from the face of God – it is like a warm fire, it is like dear sleep, it is like a great anthem, yet there is a stillness all about it, a stillness full of lights.”

— Lord Dunsany

40. “The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man.”

— Lord Dunsany

41. “And beyond that circle whence so much was beaten back by the bright vehemence of the good man’s curses, the will-o’-the-wisps rioted, and many a strangeness that poured in that night from Elfland, and goblins held high holiday.”

— Lord Dunsany

42. “Who knows what brings fortune, since we cannot see the end?”

— Lord Dunsany

43. “And the dawn grew strangely and slowly over those unwonted lands, pouring upon them the colours that day after day our daffodils, and day after day our wild roses, through all the weeks of their season, drink deep with voluptuous assemblies in utterly silent riot.”

— Lord Dunsany

44. “But the lonely fancy that had not fact to feed on, nor the fancy of any other for fellowship, was for its loneliness mad.”

— Lord Dunsany

45. “He asked her what she was doing there, on the heath with her broom in the evening. “Sweeping the world,” she said. And Alveric wondered what rejected things she was sweeping away from the world, with grey dust mournfully turning over and over as it drifted across our fields, going slowly into the darkness that was gathering beyond our coasts. “Why are you sweeping the world, Mother Witch?” he said. “There’s things in the world that ought not to be here,” said she.”

— Lord Dunsany