Quotes by T.H. White

The author says people are guilty of wrecking the present because the future was bound to be a wreck.

It is only people who are lacking, or bad, or inferior, who have to be good at things. You have always been full and perfect, so you had nothing to make up for.

So Merlyn sent you to me, said the badger, to finish your education. Well, I can only teach you two things -- to dig, and love your home. These are the true end of philosophy.

Poor Cook, thought Captain, I must be kinder to her. She makes a splendid pet. How faithful she is! I always say you cant get the same love from a dog that you can from a human. So clever, too. I believe she understands every word I say. I believe they have souls, just like dogs. Its uncanny how canine a human can be, if you are kind to them and treat them well. I know for a fact that when some dogs in history died, their humans lay down on the grave and howled all night and refused food and pined away. It was just instinct, of course, not real intelligence, but all the same it makes you think. I believe that when a human does, it goes to a special heaven for humans, with kind dogs to look after it.

Grown-ups have developed an unpleasant habit of comforting themselves for their degradation by pretending that children are childish.

We have invented a moral sense which is rotting now that we cant give it employment, and when a moral sense begins to rot, it is worse than when you had none. I suppose that all endeavors which are directed to a purely worldly end, as my precious civilization was, contain within themselves the germs of their own corruption.

People will do the basest things on account of their so-called honor.

Any one war seems rooted in its antecedents.

He had conquered murder only to be faced with war. There were no laws for that.

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.

Middle-aged people can balance between believing in God and breaking all the commandments without difficulty.

Kings can only use their best tools.

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.

Dont kill me, said the knight. I yield. I yield. You cant kill a man at mercy.Lancelot put up his sword and went back from the knight, as if he were going back from his own soul. He felt in his heart cruelty and cowardice, the things which made him brave and kind.Get up, he said. I wont hurt you. Get up, go.The knight looked at him, on all fours like a dog, and stood up, crouching uncertainly.Lancelot went away and was sick.

He did not himself believe in the supernatural, but the thing happened, and he proposed to tell it as simply as possible. It was stupid of him to say that it shook his faith in mundane affairs, for it was just as mundane as anything else. Indeed the really frightening part about it was the horribly tangible atmosphere in which it took place. None of the outlines wavered in the least. The creature would have been less remarkable if it had been less natural. It seemed to overcome the usual laws without being immune to them. (The Troll)

It is the bad people who need to have principles to restrain them.

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.

These marvels were great and comfortable ones, but in the old England there was a greater still. The weather behaved itself.In the spring all the little flowers came out obediently in the meads, and the dew sparkled, and the birds sang; in the summer it was beautifully hot for no less than four months, and, if it did rain just enough for agricultural purposes, they managed to arrange it so that it rained while you were in bed; in the autumn the leaves flamed and rattled before the west winds, tempering their sad adieu with glory; and in the winter, which was confined by statute to two months, the snow lay evenly, three feet thick, but never turned into slush.

Mordred and Agravaine thought Arthur hypocritical—as all decent men must be, if you assume that decency can’t exist.

The increasingly cynical court thought Arthur, hypocritical, as all decent men must be if you assume decency cannot exist.