Home
Novels
Journalism
Other Writing
Quotations
Criticism
Collections
Features
Timeline
Pictures
MR Society
Links
Contact

Quotations

What are the facts? Not those in Homer, Shakespeare, or even the Bible. The facts for most of us are a dark street, crowds, hurry, commonplaceness, loneliness, and, worse than all, a terrible doubt which can hardly be named as to the meaning and purpose of the world.
Last Pages from a Journal, 1915

Never say anything remarkable. It is sure to be wrong.
Last Pages from a Journal, 1915

What is more wonderful than the delight which the mind feels when it knows? This delight is not for anything beyond the knowing, but is in the act of knowing. It is the satisfaction of a primary instinct.
Last Pages from a Journal, 1915

One fourth of life is intelligible, the other three-fourths is unintelligible darkness; and our first duty is to cultivate the habit of not looking round the corner.
The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, 1881

Socialism, towards which everything is drifting, may turn out to be a great failure. In my opinion it will certainly fail, and the reaction will be disastrous and put us back beyond where we are now, but at any rate Socialism is an idea, and in so far as it aspires to govern the world by an idea it is progress.
Last Pages from a Journal, 1915

Stonehenge, after you get acquainted with it, is wonderful, but I find it disposes me to indefinite, vague misty sentiments, and these I try to avoid as much as possible.
Letter dated July 9, 1888, Bedford Public Library

A monument like this so easily lends itself to the very simple, but perfectly worthless depression begotten by the idea of the transitory passage of the generations across the planet.
Letter dated July 13, 1888, Bedford Public Library

There is always a multitude of reasons both in favour of doing a thing and against doing it. The art of debate lies in presenting them; the art of life lies in neglecting ninety-nine hundredths of them.
More Pages from a Journal, 1910

I have a strange fancy - that there is one word which I was sent into the world to say. At times I can dimly make it out but I cannot see it. Nevertheless it seems to make all other speech seem beside the mark and futile.
Last Pages from a Journal, 1915

Talk about the atrocities of the Revolution! All the atrocities of the democracy heaped together ever since the world began would not equal the atrocities perpetrated in a week upon the poor, simply because they are poor; and the marvel is, not that there is every now and then a September massacre at which the world shrieks, but that such horrors are so infrequent.
The Revolution in Tanner's Lane, 1887

We cannot really understand a religion unless we have believed it.
More Pages from a Journal, 1910

In the presence of some people we inevitably depart from ourselves: we are inaccurate, we say things we do not feel, and talk nonsense. When we get home we are conscious that we have made fools of ourselves. Never go near these people.
More Pages from a Journal, 1910

Men should not be too curious in analysing and condemning any means which nature devises to save them from themselves, whether it be coins, old books, curiosities, butterflies, or fossils.
The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, 1881

There is in a man an upwelling spring of life, energy, love, whatever you like to call it. If a course is not cut for it, it turns the ground round it into a swamp.
More Pages from a Journal, 1910

When we grow old we find that what is commonplace is true.
Catharine Furze, 1893

As I got older I became aware of the folly of this perpetual reaching after the future, and of drawing from to-morrow, and from to-morrow only, a reason for the joyfulness of to-day. I learned, when, alas! it was almost too late, to live in each moment as it passed over my head, believing that the sun as it is now rising is as good as it will ever be, and blinding myself as much as possible to what may follow. But when I was young I was the victim of that illusion, implanted for some purpose or other in us by Nature, which causes us, on the brightest morning in June, to think immediately of a brighter morning which is to come in July.
The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, 1881

To die is easy when we are in perfect health. On a fine spring morning, out of doors, on the downs, mind and body sound and exhilarated, it would be nothing to lie down on the turf and pass away.
More Pages from a Journal, 1910