190 Quotes by T.H. White

To disbelieve in original sin, does not mean that you must believe in original virtue. It only means that you must not believe that people are utterly wicked.

He was neither clever nor sensitive, but he was loyal – stubbornly sometimes, and even annoyingly and stupidly so in later life.

For in those days love was ruled by a different convention to ours. In those days it was chivalrous, adult, long, religious, almost platonic. It was not a matter about which you could make accusations lightly. It was not, as we take it to be nowadays, begun and ended in a long week-end.

Grey damp would be around them, and the sun, a copper penny, would fade away. The wings next to their own wings would shade into vacancy, until each bird was a lonely sound in cold annihilation, a presence after uncreation. And there they would hang in chartless nothing, seemingly without speed or left or right or top or bottom, until as suddenly as ever the copper penny glowed and the serpents writhed.

Jenny, all my life I have wanted to do 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.

How condescending, how splendidly democratic of Sir Lancelot, to laugh, as if he were an ordinary man! Perhaps he eats and drinks as well, or even sleeps at night.

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.

I am writing a treatise just now” said the badger, coughing diffidently to show that he was absolutely set on explaining it, “which is to point out why Man has become the master of the animals. Perhaps you would like to hear it? It’s for my doctor’s degree you know,” he added hastily, before Wart could protest. He got few chances of reading his treatise to anybody, so he could not bear to let the opportunity slip by.

If it takes a million years for a fish to become a reptile, has Man, in our few hundred, altered out of recognition?