H. Rider Haggard

“The food that memory gives to eat is bitter to the taste, and it is only with the teeth of hope that we can bear to bite it.”

“I do not believe in violence; it is the last resort of fools.”

“The great wheel of Fate rolls on like a Juggernaut, and crushes us all in turn, some soon, some late”

“There is no loneliness like the loneliness of crowds, especially to those who are unaccustomed to them.”

“There are things and there are faces which, when felt or seen for the first time, stamp themselves upon the mind like a sun image on a sensitized plate and there remain unalterably fixed.”

“For he was a merciful man, who loved not slaughter, although his fierce faith drove him from war to war.”

“My death is very near to me, and of this I am glad, for I desire to pursue the quest in other realms, as it has been promised to me that I shall do.”

“We white people think that we know everything.”

“It is awkward to listen to oneself being praised, and I was always a shy man.”

“I have never observed that the religious are more eager to die than the rest of us poor mortals.”

“After spending a week in Cape Town, finding that they overcharged me at the hotel, and having seen everything there was to see, including the botanical gardens, which seem to me likely to confer a great benefit on the country, and the new Houses of Parliament, which I expect will do nothing of the sort, I determined to go back to Natal.”

“Everything has an end, if only you live long enough to see it.”

“Altogether, a more miserable trio than we were that evening it would have been difficult to discover; and our only comfort lay in the reflection that we were exceedingly fortunate to be there to feel miserable, instead of being stretched dead upon the plain, as so many thousands of brave men were that night, who had risen well and strong in the morning.”

“It is easier to destroy knowledge, Ignosi, than to gather it.”

“I am not a nervous man in a general way, and very little troubled with superstitions, of which I have lived to see the folly.”

“For what man is there who does not prize that gift most rare and beautiful, that one perfect thing which no gold can buy – a woman's unfeigned love?”

“How strange a thing is a love of woman, that is so small in the beginning and in its ends so great! (...) For when the Invisible conceived the order of universe He set this seed of woman's love within its plan, that by its most unequal growth is doomed to bring about equality of law. For now it lifts the low to heights untold, and now it brings the noble to the level of the dust. And thus, while Woman, this great surprise of Nature, is, Good and Evil can never grow apart.”

“Love counts not its labour nor can it weigh its tenderness in the scale of purchase. That which it has it gives, and craves for more to give and give, till the soul's infinity be drained.”

“Those who go secretly, go evilly; and foul birds love to fly at night.”

“The shaft of my vengeance fell upon my own head.”

“And now let us love and take that which is given us, and be happy; for in the grave there is no love and no warmth, nor any touching of the lips. Nothing perchance, or perchance but bitter memories of what might have been.”

“Yet man dies not whilst the world, at once his mother and his monument, remains. His name is lost, indeed, but the breath he breathed still stirs the pine-tops on the mountains, the sound of the words he spoke yet echoes on through space; the thoughts his brain gave birth to we have inherited to-day; his passions are our cause of life; the joys and sorrows that he knew are our familiar friends--the end from which he fled aghast will surely overtake us also!”

“Man doeth this and doeth that from the good or evil of his heart; but he knows not to what end his sense doth prompt him; for when he strikes he is blind to where the blow shall fall, nor can he count the airy threads that weave the web of circumstance. Good and evil, love and hate, night and day, sweet and bitter, man and woman, heaven above and the earth beneath--all those things are needful, one to the other, and who knows the end of each?”

“Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and passed away to be forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This is but one of several; for Time eats up the works of man.”

“Listen! What is life? It is a feather, it is the seed of the grass, blown hither and thither, sometimes multiplying itself and dying in the act, sometimes carried away into the heavens. But if that seed be good and heavy it may perchance travel a little way on the road it wills. It is well to try and journey one's road and to fight with the air. Man must die. At the worst he can but die a little sooner.”

“Yea, all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten.”