CliffsNotes on White's the Once and Future King Quotes

“Gawaine and Gareth took turns with the fat ass, one of them whacking it while the other rode bareback.”
― T.H. White, CliffsNotes on White's the Once and Future King

“He knew suddenly that nobody, living upon the remotest, most barren crag in the ocean, could complain of a dull landscape so long as he would lift his eyes. In the sky there was a new landscape every minute, in every pool of the sea rocks, a new world.”
― T.H. White, CliffsNotes on White's the Once and Future King

“The slow discovery of the seventh sense, by which both men and women contrive to ride the waves of a world in which there is war, adultery, compromise, fear, stultification and hypocrisy—this discovery is not a matter for triumph... And at this stage we begin to forget that there ever was a time when we lacked the seventh sense. We begin to forget, as we go stolidly balancing along, that there could have been a time when we were young bodies flaming with the impetus of life. It is hardly consoling to remember such a feeling, and so it deadens in our minds.

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 it was of vital interest to us to find out whether there was a God or not... Further back, there were times when we wondered with all our souls what the world was, what love was, what we were ourselves.

All these problems and feelings fade away when we get the seventh sense. Middle-aged people can balance between believing in God and breaking all the commandments, without difficulty. The seventh sense, indeed, slowly kills all the other ones, so that at last there is no trouble about the commandments. We cannot see any more, or feel, or hear about them. The bodies which we loved, the truths which we sought, the Gods whom we questioned: we are deaf and blind to them now, safely and automatically
balancing along toward the inevitable grave, under the protection of our last sense.”
― T.H. White, CliffsNotes on White's the Once and Future King

“Nearly all the ways of giving justice are unfair.”
― T.H. White, CliffsNotes on White's the Once and Future King

“Do you think you can stop the consequences of a bad action, by doing good ones afterwards? I don't. I have been trying to stopper it down with good actions, ever since, but it goes on in widening circles.”
― T.H. White, CliffsNotes on White's the Once and Future King

“But my poor Lance, to have given up your glory and not to get anything back! When you were a sinful man you were always victorious, so why should you always be beaten when you were heavenly? And why are you always hurt by the things you love? What did you do?'
'I knelt down in the water of Mortoise, Jenny, where he had knocked me--and I thanked God for the adventure.”
― T.H. White, CliffsNotes on White's the Once and Future King

“Even if they were foolish enough to believe that the earth was the centre of the universe, do we not ourselves believe that man is the fine flower of creation?”
― T.H. White, CliffsNotes on White's the Once and Future King

“A woman can forget a lot of love in two years--or at any rate she can pack it away, and grow accustomed to it, and hardly remember it more than a business-man might remember an occasion when, by ill-luck, he failed to make an investment which would have made him a millionaire.”
― T.H. White, CliffsNotes on White's the Once and Future King

“Morals," said Lionel, "are a form of insanity. Give me a moral man who insists on doing the right thing all the time, and I will show you a tangle which an angel couldn't get out of.”
― T.H. White, CliffsNotes on White's the Once and Future King

“The best thing for being sad,’ replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow ‘is to learn something. That is 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 honor 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 thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn- pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and Theo-criticism and geography and history and economics- why you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood or spend fifty years learning to begin to beat your adversary at fencing. After that, you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.”
― T.H. White, CliffsNotes on White's the Once and Future King

“It was as if everything would lead to sorrow, so long as man refused to forget the past. The wrongs of Uther and of Cain were wrongs which could have been righted only by the blessing of forgetting them.”
― T.H. White, CliffsNotes on White's the Once and Future King

“- 'Well?' asked Adam, turning back from his dismissal.
- 'We were only going to say,' said God shyly, twisting Their hands together. 'Well, we were just going to say, God bless you.”
― T.H. White, CliffsNotes on White's the Once and Future King

“The best thing for being sad… is to learn something. That is 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 honor 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.”
― T.H. White, CliffsNotes on White's the Once and Future King

“It would be much the same thing if you each hired the best arguer you knew, to argue about it. In the last resort it is usually the richest person who wins, whether he hires the most expensive arguer or the most expensive fighter, so it is no good pretending that this is simply a matter of brute force.”
― T.H. White, CliffsNotes on White's the Once and Future King

“Nay," said Sir Lancelot "...for once shamed may never be recovered.”
― T.H. White, CliffsNotes on White's the Once and Future King

“You swim along," said the tench, "as if there was nothing to be afraid of in the world. Don't you see that this place is exactly like the forest which you had to come through to find me?”
― T.H. White, CliffsNotes on White's the Once and Future King

“If you achieve perfection, you die.”
― T.H. White, CliffsNotes on White's the Once and Future King