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H. Rider Haggard

105 quotes

• “You lie; you always were a liar, and you always will be a liar.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) first seen 1884 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Dawn (1884), CHAPTER I

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

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) first seen 1884 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Dawn (1884), CHAPTER XXI

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

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) first seen 1887 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: A Tale of Three Lions (1887), CHAPTER I, THE INTEREST ON TEN SHILLINGS

• “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.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) first seen 1888 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Colonel Quaritch, V. C.: A Tale of Country Life (1888), CHAPTER I, HAROLD QUARITCH MEDITATES

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

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) first seen 1904 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Brethren (1904), PROLOGUE

• “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.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) first seen 1905 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Ayesha: The Return of She (1905), CHAPTER I, THE DOUBLE SIGN

• “We white people think that we know everything.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) first seen 1913 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Child of Storm (1913), CHAPTER I, ALLAN QUATERMAIN HEARS OF MAMEENA

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

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) first seen 1915 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Holy Flower (1915), CHAPTER I, BROTHER JOHN

• “After all, dangers are everywhere; those who turn back because of dangers will never succeed in any life that we can imagine.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) first seen 1915 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Holy Flower (1915), CHAPTER 9, BAUSI THE KING

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

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Ancient Allan (1920), CHAPTER I, AN OLD FRIEND

• “Now all the world is wonderful, but surely among its countries there is none more so than Africa; no, not even China the unchanging, or India the ancient. For this reason, I think: those great lands have always been more or less known to their own inhabitants, whereas Africa, as a whole, from the beginning was and still remains unknown.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Treasure of the Lake (1926), CHAPTER I, KANEKE'S TALE

• “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.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “He is an extraordinary animal is the house fly. Go where you will you find him, and so it must have been always. I have seen him enclosed in amber, which is, I was told, quite half a million years old, looking exactly like his descendant of to-day, and I have little doubt but that when the last man lies dying on the earth he will be buzzing round – if this event should happen to occur in summer – watching for an opportunity to settle on his nose.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Then the irony of the situation forced itself upon me. There around us lay treasures enough to pay off a moderate national debt, or to build a fleet of ironclads, and yet we would have bartered them all gladly for the faintest chance of escape. Soon, doubtless, we should be rejoiced to exchange them for a bit of food or a cup of water, and, after that, even for the privilege of a speedy close to our sufferings. Truly wealth, which men spend their lives in acquiring, is a valueless thing at the last.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 bitter memories of what might have been.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “[T]hinking can only serve to measure out the helplessness of thought.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Ah, how little knowledge does a man acquire in his life. He gathereth it like water, but like water it runneth through his fingers, and yet, if his hands be but wet as though with dew, behold a generation of fools call out, "See, he is a wise man!”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “There is no such thing as magic, though there is such a thing as a knowledge of the secrets of nature.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “[M]emory haunts me from age to age, and passion leads me by the hand—evil have I done, and with sorrow have I made acquaintance from age to age, and from age to age evil I shall do, and sorrow shall I know till my redemption comes.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “[T]he 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.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Strange are the pictures of the future that mankind can thus draw with this brush of faith and this many-coloured pigment of imagination! Strange, too, that no one of them doth agree with another!”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Truly time should be measured by events, and not by the lapse of hours.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “[I]n all essentials the savage and the child of civilization are identical.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Civilization is only savagery silver-gilt.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “[T]he law of England is much more severe upon offences against property than against the person, as becomes a people whose ruling passion is money.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “How true is the saying that the very highest in rank are always the most simple and kindly. It is in your half-and-half sort of people that you find pompousness and vulgarity.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Passion is like the lightning, it is beautiful, and it links the earth to heaven, but alas it blinds and kills!”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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?”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “. . . is [it] better to be alive or dead[?] The religious plump for the latter, though I have never observed that the religious are more eager to die than the rest of us poor mortals.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The truth is that we fear to die because all the religions are full of uncomfortable hints as to what may happen to us afterwards as a reward for our deviations from their laws and we half believe in something . . . For very few inhabitants of this earth can attain either to complete belief or to its absolute opposite. They can seldom lay their hands upon their hearts, and say that they know that they will live for ever, or sleep for ever; there remains in the case of most honest men an element of doubt in either hypothesis.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Never stretch out your hand to Death till he stretches out his to you”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “. . . who ever sees Wisdom until she is flying away?”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The seconds seemed minutes, the minutes seemed hours, and the hours seemed years. . . Where now were the gods I had worshipped and—was there any god? Or was man but a self-deceiver who created gods instead of the gods creating him, because he did not love to think of an eternal blackness in which he would soon be swallowed up and lost? Well, at least that would mean sleep, and sleep is better than torment of mind or body.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The tool carves the statue and the hand holds the tool but the spirit guides the band.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “. . . why do you seek to peer into the future, which from day to day will unroll itself as does a scroll? Be content with the present, man, and take what Fate gives you of good or ill, not seeking to learn what offerings he hides beneath his robe in the days and the years and the centuries to come.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “While you are a man, live the life of a man, and when you become a spirit, live the life of a spirit. But do not seek to mix the two together like oil and wine, and thus spoil both.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “. . . too great holiness often thwarts itself and ends in trouble for the unholy flesh.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “. . . do not lie except when you are obliged, for jugglers who play with too many knives are apt to cut their fingers.”

  H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) said by 1925 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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