Allan Quatermain Quotes

“How can a world be good in which Money is the moving power, and Self-interest the guiding star?”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“Women love the last blow as well as the last word, and when they fight for love they are pitiless as a wounded buffalo.”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“Passion is like the lightening, it is beautiful and it links the earth to heaven, but it blinds.”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“How true is the saying that the very highest in rank are always the most simple and kindly. It is from you half-and-half sort of people that you get pomposity and vulgarity”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“I do love a good tree. There it stands so strong and sturdy, and yet so beautiful, a very type of the best sort of man. How proudly it lifts its bare head to the winter storms, and with what a full heart it rejoices when the spring has come again! How grand its voice is, too, when it talks with the wind: a thousand aeolian harps cannot equal the beauty of the sighing of a great tree in leaf. All day it points to the sunshine and all night to the stars, and thus passionless, and yet full of life, it endures through the centuries, come storm, come shine, drawing its sustenance from the cool bosom of its mother earth, and as the slow years roll by, learning the great mysteries of growth and of decay. And so on and on through generations, outliving individuals, customs, dynasties -- all save the landscape it adorns and human nature -- till the appointed day when the wind wins the long battle and rejoices over a reclaimed space, or decay puts the last stroke to his fungus-fingered work. Ah, one should always think twice before one cuts down a tree!”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“Well, it is not a good world -- nobody can say that it is, save those who wilfully blind themselves to facts. How can a world be good in which Money is the moving power, and Self-interest the guiding star? The wonder is not that it is so bad, but that there should be any good left in it.”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“Civilisation is only savagery silver-gilt.”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“I let him run on awhile, reflecting to myself how easy we find it to be hard on the weaknesses of others, and how tender we are to our own.”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“Passion is like the lightning, it is beautiful, and it links the earth to heaven, but alas it blinds!”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“But what is done is done. Who can make the dead tree green, or gaze again upon last year's light? Who can recall the spoken word, or bring back the spirit of the fallen? That which Time swallows comes not up again. Let it be forgotten!”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“I make no apology for this digression, especially as this is an introduction which all young people and those who never like to think (and it is a bad habit) will naturally skip. It seems to me very desirable that we should sometimes try to understand the limitations of our nature, so that we may not be carried away by the pride of knowledge. Man's cleverness is almost indefinite, and stretches like an elastic band, but human nature is like an iron ring. You can go round and round it, you can polish it highly, you can even flatten it a little on one side, whereby you will make it bulge out the other, but you will never, while the world endures and man is man, increase its total circumference. It is the one fixed unchangeable thing -- fixed as the stars, more enduring than the mountains, as unalterable as the way of the Eternal. Human nature is God's kaleidoscope, and the little bits of coloured glass which represent our passions, hopes, fears, joys, aspirations towards good and evil and what not, are turned in His mighty hand as surely and as certainly as it turns the stars, and continually fall into new patterns and combinations. But the composing elements remain the same, nor will there be one more bit of coloured glass nor one less for ever and ever.”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“The great wheel of fate rolls on like a Juggernaut, and crushes us all in turn, some soon, some late - it does not matter when, in the end, it crushes us all.”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“Another minute passed, when suddenly something round fell with a soft but heavy thud upon the stone flooring of the veranda, and came bounding and rolling along past me. For a moment I did not rise, but sat wondering what it could be. Finally, I concluded it must have been an animal. Just then, however, another idea struck me, and I got up quick enough. The thing lay quite still a few feet beyond me. I put down my hand towards it and it did not move: clearly it was not an animal. My hand touched it. It was soft and warm and heavy. Hurriedly I lifted it and held it up against the faint starlight. It was a newly severed human head!”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“And so I lay awake, smoking and reflecting on many things, but, being of a practical turn of mind, chiefly on how we were to give those Masai villains the slip. It was a beautiful moonlight night, and, notwithstanding the mosquitoes, and the great risk we were running from fever from sleeping in such a spot, and forgetting that I had the cramp very badly in my right leg from squatting in a constrained position in the canoe, and that the Wakwafi who was sleeping beside me smelt horribly, I really began to enjoy myself. The moonbeams played upon the surface of the running water that speeded unceasingly past us towards the sea, like men's lives towards the grave, till it glittered like a wide sheet of silver, that is in the open where the trees threw no shadows. Near the banks, however, it was very dark, and the night wind sighed sadly in the reeds.”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“And it is, by the way, from the presence of others that we really derive support in our dark hours of grief, and not from their talk, which often only serves to irritate us.”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“Man's cleverness is almost indefinite, and stretches like an elastic band, but human nature is like an iron ring.”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“I love thee, Macumazahn, for we have grown grey together, and there is that between us that cannot be seen, and yet is too strong for breaking;”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“Although she was at an age when in England girls are in the schoolroom and come down to dessert, this 'child of the wilderness' had more courage, discretion, and power of mind than many a woman of mature age nurtured in idleness and luxury, with minds carefully drilled and educated out of any originality or self-resource that nature may have endowed them with.”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“So, when the heart is stricken, and the head is humbled in the dust, civilization fails us utterly. Back, back, we creep, and lay us like little children on the great breast of Nature, she that perchance may soothe us and make us forget, or at least rid remembrance of its sting. Who has not in his great grief felt a longing to look upon the outward features of the universal Mother; to lie on the mountains and watch the clouds drive across the sky and hear the rollers break in thunder on the shore, to let his poor struggling life mingle for a while in her life; to feel the slow beat of her eternal heart, and to forget his woes, and let his identity be swallowed in the vast imperceptibly moving energy of her of whom we are, from whom we came, and with whom we shall again be mingled, who gave us birth, and will in a day to come give us our burial also.”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“Who has not in his great grief felt a longing to look upon the outward features of the universal Mother; to lie on the mountains and watch the clouds drive across the sky and hear the rollers break in thunder on the shore, to let his poor struggling life mingle for a while in her life; to feel the slow beat of her eternal heart, and to forget his woes, and let his identity be swallowed in the vast imperceptibly moving energy of her of whom we are, from whom we came, and with whom we shall again be mingled, who gave us birth, and will in a day to come give us our burial also.”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“Well, it is not a good world—nobody can say that it is, save those who wilfully blind themselves to facts. How can a world be good in which Money is the moving power, and Self-interest the guiding star? The wonder is not that it is so bad, but that there should be any good left in it.”
― H Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“Civilization is only savagery silver-gilt. A vainglory is it, and like a northern light, comes but to fade and leave the sky more dark.”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“truth I shall be dead. So is it with us all. How many millions have lain as I lie, and thought these thoughts and been forgotten! -- thousands upon thousands of years ago they thought them, those dying men of the dim past; and thousands on thousands of years hence will their descendants think them and be in their turn forgotten. 'As the breath of the oxen in winter, as the quick star that runs along the sky, as a little shadow that loses itself at sunset,' as I once heard a Zulu called Ignosi put it, such is the order of our life, the order that passeth away.”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“...religion which is nothing more of less than sun-worship of a pronounced and highly developed character.”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“...minds carefully drilled and educated out of any originality or self-resource that nature may have endowed them with.”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“How can a world be good in which Money is the moving power, and Self-interest the guiding star? The wonder is not that it is so bad, but that there should be any good left in it.”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“if the moths would always carefully avoid the candle, how few burnt wings there would be!”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“and no more dreadful fate can befall a man than to become the tool of an unscrupulous woman, or indeed of any woman. There is but one end to it: when he is broken, or has served her purpose, he is thrown away -- turned out on the world to hunt for his lost self-respect.”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“I am wondering,' I answered, 'on what principle it is arranged that some people should find beautiful queens to fall in love with them, while others find nobody at all, or worse than nobody; and I am also wondering how many brave men's lives this night's work will cost.' It was rather nasty of me, perhaps, but somehow all the feelings do not evaporate with age, and I could not help being a little jealous of my old friend's luck. Vanity, my sons; vanity of vanities!”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain

“for beauty, dependent as it is to a certain extent upon the imagination, is never so beautiful as when it is half hid.”
― H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain