Winifred Holtby Quotes

The things that one most wants to do are the things that are probably most worth doing.

The crown of life is neither happiness nor annihilation; it is understanding.

We're so busy resigning ourselves to the inevitable that we don't even ask if it is inevitable. We've got to have courage, to take our future into our hands. If the law is oppressive, we must change the law. If tradition is obstructive, we must break tradition. If the system is unjust, we must reform the system.

Question everyone in authority, and see that you get sensible answers to your questions ... questioning does not mean the end of loving, and loving does not mean the abnegation of intelligence. Vow as much love to your country as you like ... but, I implore you, do not forget to question.

This alone is to be feared - the closed mind, the sleeping imagination, the death of the spirit. The death of the body is to that, I think, a little thing.

It's the things you don't do, not the things you do, you feel most sorry for.

Love needs the stiffening of respect, the give and take of equality.

There's never been a lack of men willing to die bravely. The trouble is to find a few able to live sensibly.

A sense of humor is so handy, isn't it? It lets you see both sides of a question so that you never need do anything.

Really, trees are nearly as important as men, and much better behaved.

Nature is not silent, and never was a name more derisively inappropriate than when we speak of these non-human creatures who hoot and crow and bray as the dumb animals.

We each live in a private, distorted, individual world - stars turning in space, warmed for a moment by each other's light, then lost in infinite distance.

I am much perturbed by this business of sickness. Our bodies seem so easily to leap into the saddle where our minds should be. People who are ill become changelings.

When a person that one loves is in the world and alive and well, and pleased to be in the world, then to miss them is only a new flavor, a salt sharpness in experience. It is when the beloved is unhappy or maimed or troubled that one misses with pain.

no truth is strong enough to defeat a well-established legend.

Oh, time betrays us. Time is the great enemy.

Life flows on over death as water closes over a stone dropped into a pool. ... Fate is certain; death is certain; but the courage and nobility of men and women matter more than these.

But questioning does not mean the end of loving, and loving does not mean the abnegation of intelligence

Everybody's tragedy is somebody's nuisance.

The world, with all its beauty and adventure, its richness and variety, is darkened by cruelty. Death, if it ends the loveliness, the adventure, ends also that. Death balances the picture.

Sorrow and frustration have their power. The world is moved by people with great discontents. Happiness is a drug. It can make men blind and deaf and insensible to reality. There are times when only sorrow can give to sorrow.

You are quite, quite wrong if you think that ... I find your happiness painful. What matters is that happiness - the golden day - should exist in the world, not much to whom it comes. For all of us it is so transitory a thing, how could one not draw joy from its arrival?

we are so little, so ignorant, so feeble an infant race crawling on a planet between immensities we haven't even begun to understand, that really we have no grounds for either congratulation or despair.

it is the brevity of life which makes it tolerable; its experiences have value because they have an end.

I would, if I could, always feed to music. The singularly graceless action of thus filling one's body with roots and dead animals and powdered grain is given some significance then. One can perform as a ritual what one is shamed to do as a utilitarian action.