T.H. White > Quotes

“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Perhaps we all give the best of our hearts uncritically--to those who hardly think about us in return.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment.”
― T.H. White

“The bravest people are the ones who don’t mind looking like cowards.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“We cannot build the future by avenging the past.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“She hardly ever thought of him. He had worn a place for himself in some corner of her heart, as a sea shell, always boring against the rock, might do. The making of the place had been her pain. But now the shell was safely in the rock. It was lodged, and ground no longer.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Perhaps he does not want to be friends with you until he knows what you are like. With owls, it is never easy-come-easy-go.”
― T.H. White, The Sword in the Stone

“If people reach perfection they vanish, you know.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Life is such unutterable hell, solely because it is sometimes beautiful. If we could only be miserable all the time, if there could be no such things as love or beauty or faith or hope, if I could be absolutely certain that my love would never be returned, how much more simple life would be. One could plod through the Siberian salt mines of existence without being bothered about happiness. Unfortunately happiness is there. There is always the chance (about eight hundred and fifty to one) that another heart will come to mine. I can't help hoping and keeping faith and loving beauty. Quite frequently I am not so miserable as it would be wise to be.”
― T.H. White, Ghostly, Grim and Gruesome

“Now, in their love, which was stronger, there were the seeds of hatred and fear and confusion growing at the same time: for love can exist with hatred, each preying on the other, and this is what gives it its greatest fury.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“We find that at present the human race is divided into one wise man, nine knaves, and ninety fools out of every hundred. That is, by an optimistic observer. The nine knaves assemble themselves under the banner of the most knavish among them, and become 'politicians'; the wise man stands out, because he knows himself to be hopelessly outnumbered, and devotes himself to poetry, mathematics, or philosophy; while the ninety fools plod off under the banners of the nine villains, according to fancy, into the labyrinths of chicanery, malice and warfare. It is pleasant to have command, observes Sancho Panza, even over a flock of sheep, and that is why the politicians raise their banners. It is, moreover, the same thing for the sheep whatever the banner. If it is democracy, then the nine knaves will become members of parliament; if fascism, they will become party leaders; if communism, commissars. Nothing will be different, except the name. The fools will be still fools, the knaves still leaders, the results still exploitation. As for the wise man, his lot will be much the same under any ideology. Under democracy he will be encouraged to starve to death in a garret, under fascism he will be put in a concentration camp, under communism he will be liquidated.”
― T.H. White, The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once & Future King

“The only cure for sadness is to learn something”
― T.H. White

“If there is one thing I can't stand, it is stupidity. I always say that stupidity is the Sin against the Holy Ghost.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“A chaos of mind and body - a time for weeping at sunsets and at the glamour of moonlight - a confusion and profusion of beliefs and hopes, in God, in Truth, in Love, and in Eternity - an ability to be transported by the beauty of physical objects - a heart to ache or swell- a joy so hoyful and a sorrow so sorrowful that oceans could lie between them...”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“In war, our elders may give the orders...but it is the young who have to fight.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“I can imagine nothing more terrifying than an Eternity filled with men who were all the same. The only thing which has made life bearable…has been the diversity of creatures on the surface of the globe.”
― T.H. White, The Book of Merlyn

“It is a pity that there are no big creatures to prey on humanity. If there were enough dragons and rocs, perhaps mankind would turn its might against them. Unfortunately man is preyed upon by microbes, which are too small to be appreciated.”
― T.H. White, The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once & Future King

“Only fools want to be great.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“There is one fairly good reason for fighting - and that is, if the other man starts it. You see, wars are a great wickedness, perhaps the greatest wickedness of a wicked species. They are so wicked that they must not be allowed. When you can be perfectly certain that the other man started them, then is the time when you might have a sort of duty to stop them. ”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“You run a grave risk, my boy," said the magician, "of being turned into a piece of bread, and toasted.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“I am an anarchist, like any other sensible person.
~ Merlyn”
― T.H. White, The Book of Merlyn

“But there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned... There was a time when Free Love versus Catholic Morality was a question of as much importance to our hot bodies as if a pistol had been clapped to our heads.

Further back, there were times when we wondered with all our souls, what the world was, what love was, what we were ourselves.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“He, unfortunately for himself, had been beautifully brought up. His teacher had educated him as the child is educated in the womb, where it lives the history of man from fish to mammal--and, like the child in the womb, he had been protected with love meanwhile. The effect of such an education was that he had grown up without any of the useful accomplishments for living--without malice, vanity, suspicion, cruelty, and the commoner forms of selfishness. Jealousy seemed to him the most ignoble of vices. He was sadly unfitted for hating his best friend or torturing his wife. He had been given too much love and trust to be good at these things.”
― T.H. White

“You could not give up a human heart as you could give up drinking. The drink was yours, and you could give it up: but your lover’s soul was not your own: it was not at your disposal; you had a duty towards it.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Might does not make right! Right makes right!”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws which are constant. It has no rules. Only, in the long years which bring women to the middle of life, a sense of balance develops…when she is beginning to hate her used body, she suddenly finds that she can do it. She can go on living…
”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“They made me see that the world was beautiful if you were beautiful, and that you couldn't get unless you gave. And you had to give without wanting to get.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Unfortunately we have tried to establish Right by Might, and you just can't do that”
― T.H. White

“Those who lived by the sword were forced to die by it.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“He caught a glimpse of that extraordinary faculty in man, that strange, altruistic, rare, and obstinate decency which will make writers or scientists maintain their truths at the risk of death. Eppur si muove, Galileo was to say; it moves all the same. They were to be in a position to burn him if he would go on with it, with his preposterous nonsense about the earth moving round the sun, but he was to continue with the sublime assertion because there was something which he valued more than himself. The Truth. To recognize and to acknowledge What Is. That was the thing which man could do, which his English could do, his beloved, his sleeping, his now defenceless English. They might be stupid, ferocious, unpolitical, almost hopeless. But here and there, oh so seldome, oh so rare, oh so glorious, there were those all the same who would face the rack, the executioner, and even utter extinction, in the cause of something greater than themselves. Truth, that strange thing, the jest of Pilate's. Many stupid young men had thought they were dying for it, and many would continue to die for it, perhaps for a thousand years. They did not have to be right about their truth, as Galileo was to be. It was enough that they, the few and martyred, should establish a greatness, a thing above the sum of all they ignorantly had.”
― T.H. White, The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once & Future King

“If I were to be made a knight,' said the Wart, staring dreamily into the fire, 'I should insist on doing my vigil by myself, as Hob does with his hawks, and I should pray to God to let me encounter all the evil in the world in my own person, so that if I conquered there would be none left, and, if I were defeated, I would be the one to suffer for it.'

That would be extremely presumptuous of you,' said Merlyn, 'and you would be conquered, and you would suffer for it.'

I shouldn't mind.'

Wouldn't you? Wait till it happens and see.'

Why do people not think, when they are grown up, as I do when I am young?'

Oh dear,' said Merlyn. 'You are making me feel confused. Suppose you wait till you are grown up and know the reason?'

I don't think that is an answer at all,' replied the Wart, justly.

Merlyn wrung his hands.

Well, anyway,' he said, 'suppose they did not let you stand against all the evil in the world?'

I could ask,' said the Wart.

You could ask,' repeated Merlyn.

He thrust the end of his beard into his mouth, stared tragically into the fire, and began to munch it fiercely.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“If God is supposed to be merciful,' [Arthur] retorted, 'I don't see why He shouldn't allow people to stumble into heaven, just as well as climb there”
― T.H. White

“Life is too bitter already, without territories and wars and noble feuds”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“The word "feral" has a kind of magic potency which allied itself to two other words, "ferocious" and "free." To revert to a feral state!”
― T.H. White

“If it takes a million years for a fish to become a reptile, has Man, in our few hundred, altered out of recognition?”
― T.H. White, The Candle in the Wind

“Love is a trick played on us by the forces of evolution. Pleasure is the bait laid down by the same. There is only power. Power is of the individual mind but the mind's power is not enough. Power of the body decides everything in the end and only might is right.
(Mr.P to Wart) ”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“[Kay] was not at all an unpleasant person really, but clever, quick, proud, passionate and ambitious. He was one of those people who would be neither a follower nor a leader, but
only an aspiring heart, impatient in the failing body which imprisoned it.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“War is like a fire. One man may start it, but it will spread al over. It is not about one thing in particular.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“There was just such a man when I was young—an Austrian who invented a new way of life and convinced himself that he was the chap to make it work. He tried to impose his reformation by the sword, and plunged the civilized world into misery and chaos. But the thing which this fellow had overlooked, my friend, was that he had a predecessor in the reformation business, called Jesus Christ. Perhaps we may assume that Jesus knew as much as the Austrian did about saving people. But the odd thing is that Jesus did not turn the disciples into strom troopers, burn down the Temple at Jerusalem, and fix the blame on Pontius Pilate. On the contrary, he made it clear that the business of the philosopher was to make ideas available, and not to impose them on people.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Jenny, all my life I have wanted to to miracles. I have wanted to be holy. I suppose it was ambition or pride or some other unworthy thing. It was not enough for me to conquer the world--I wanted to conquer heaven too.”
― T.H. White

“Neither force, nor argument, nor opinion," said Merlyn with the deepest sincerity, "are thinking. Argument is only a display of mental force, a sort of fencing with points in order to gain a victory, not for truth. Opinions are the blind alleys of lazy or of stupid men, who are unable to think. If ever a true politician really thinks a subject out dispassionately, even Homo stultus will be compelled to accept his findings in the end. Opinion can never stand beside truth. At present, however, Homo impoliticus is content either to argue with opinions or to fight with his fists, instead of waiting for the truth in his head. It will take a million years, before the mass of men can be called political animals.”
― T.H. White, The Book of Merlyn

“But they woke him with words, their cruel bright weapons.”
― T.H. White, The Book of Merlyn

“He thought himself awake when he was already asleep. He saw the stars above his face, whirling on their silent and sleepless axis, and the leaves of the trees rustling against them, and he heard small changes in the grass. These little noises of footsteps and soft-fringed wing-beats and stealthy bellies drawn over the grass blades or rattling against the bracken at first frightened or interested him, so that he moved to see what they were (but never saw), then soothed him, so that he no longer cared to see what they were but trusted them to be themselves, and finally left him altogether as he swam down deeper and deeper, nuzzling into the scented turf, into the warm ground, into the unending waters under the earth.”
― T.H. White

“I will tell you something else, King, which may be a surprise for you. It will not happen for hundreds of years, but both of us are to come back.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Kay was older and bigger than the Wart, so that he was bound to win in the end, but he was more nervous and imaginative. He could imagine the effect of each blow that was aimed at him, and this weakened his defense. Wart was only an infuriated hurricane.”
― T.H. White

“The miracle was that he had been allowed to do a miracle. And ever, says Mallory, Sir Lancelot wept, as he had been a child that had been beaten.”
― T.H. White

“They had a year of joy, twelve months of the strange heaven which the salmon know on beds of river shingle, under the gin-clear water. For twenty-four years they were guilty, but this first year was the only one which seemed like happiness. Looking back on it, when they were old, they did not remember that in this year it had ever rained or frozen. The four seasons were coloured like the edge of a rose petal for them.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“a king can only work with his best tools.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King