My boy, you shall be everything in the world, animal, vegetable, mineral, protista, or virus, for all I care-before I have done with you-but you will have to trust my superior backsight. The time is not yet ripe for you to be a hawk... so you may as well sit down for the moment and learn to be a human being.

T. H. White

Categorized in : Boys Animal Done With You

The bravest people are the ones who don’t mind looking like cowards.

T. H. White

courage mind people

The Destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as a collection of monkeys throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees.

T. H. White

destiny nuts men

The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment.

T. H. White

humor patience funny

Might does not make right! Right makes right!

T. H. White

might-makes-right doe might

We cannot build the future by avenging the past.

T. H. White

avenging past

We find that at present the human race is divided politically into one wise man, nine knaves, and ninety fools out of every hundred. That is, by an optimistic observer. The nine knaves assemble themselves under the banner of the most knavish among them, and become politicians; the wise man stands out, because he knows himself to be hopelessly out-numbered, and devotes himself to poetry, mathematics or philosophy; while the ninety fools plod off behind the banners of the nine villains, according to fancy, into the labyrinths of chicanery, malice and warfare.

T. H. White

optimistic wise philosophy

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 honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn.

T. H. White

education teacher inspirational

Those who lived by the sword were forced to die by it.

T. H. White

dies

Perhaps we all give the best of our hearts uncritically--to those who hardly think about us in return.

T. H. White

heart inspirational love

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 only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.

T. H. White

dream education inspirational

Only fools want to be great.

T. H. White

fool want

There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws which are constant. It has no rules. Only, in the long years which bring women to the middle of life, a sense of balance develops...when she is beginning to hate her used body, she suddenly finds that she can do it. She can go on living.

T. H. White

hate law years

The best thing for being sad ... is to learn something.

T. H. White

best-things being-sad sadness

Life is such unutterable hell, solely because it is sometimes beautiful. If we could only be miserable all the time, if there could be no such things as love or beauty or faith or hope, if I could be absolutely certain that my love would never be returned: how much more simple life would be. One could plod through the Siberian salt mines of existence without being bothered about happiness.

T. H. White

simple would-be beautiful

In war, our elders may give the orders...but it is the young who have to fight.

T. H. White

fighting war order

Wrongs have to be redressed by reason, not by force.

T. H. White

force reason

The destiny of man is an individualistic destiny.

T. H. White

individualistic destiny men

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.

T. H. White

diversity imagine men

Is there anything more terrible than perpetual motion, than doing and doing and doing, without a reason, without a consciousness, without a change, without an end?

T. H. White

consciousness ends reason

I am an anarchist, like any other sensible person. ~ Merlyn

T. H. White

anarchist persons sensible