John Galsworthy Quotes

People are wrong when they say opera is not what it used to be. It is what it used to be. That is what's wrong with it.

It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues.

There is a palpable sense of history in the homes that I choose to occupy. I think that's one of the reasons I gravitate towards old homes: I really like that sense of history and that sense that I am one step in a very long process that trails out in both directions around me - before me and ahead of me.

Periodically, I return to the classics for inspiration and refreshment.

I know part of nostalgia is romanticising the past, but I love doing things in a slower way, and the glamour of bygone eras.

Mickey Mouse to me means safety, comfort and tradition. A general wash of happiness.

I find great joy in tradition, and, in fact, I seek it.

Whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes.

A film like Genevieve to my contemporaries is not a film made years ago, but last week or last year. They see me as I was then, not as I am now. I am the reassurance that they have not changed. In an upside down world, with all the rules being rewritten as the game goes on and spectators invading the pitch, it is good to feel that some things and some people seem to stay just as they were.

I want nothing new, if I can have but a tithe of the old secured to me. I will spurn all wealth beside. Think of the consummate folly of attempting to go away from here! When the constant endeavor should be to get nearer and nearer here!

We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia and the irksomeness of action.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year~old cargo boat Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.

Fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem. It is futile to want the old days back, but that doesn't mean one should ignore the lessons of the visitable past.

We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.

If mankind were all intellect, they would be continually changing, so that one age would be entirely unlike another. The great conservative is the heart, which remains the same in all ages; so that commonplaces of a thousand years' standing are as effective as ever.

An Old World revolution is only a movement around a motionless center; it never breaks out of the circle. Firm in the center is belief in Authority.

Cousin, the days of gods and heroes are over." "Not to me. Not to them.

The past seems to infuse into the present, and in the brown, wringled faces of the old people one sees the presence of the past.

There are little pockets of old time in London, where things and places stay the same, like bubble in amber.

I think some people are just very passionate that things remain the way they were when they were kids.

I guess some things never change.

I love only extreme novelty or the things of the past.

This land, although not my native land, Will be remembered forever. And the sea's lightly iced, Unsalty water. The sand on the bottom is whiter than chalk, The air is heady, like wine, And the rosy body of the pines Is naked in the sunset hour. And the sunset itself on such waves of ether That I just can't comprehend Whether it is the end of the day, the end of the world, Or the mystery of mysteries in me again.

Tradition is the albatross around the neck of progress.