H. Rider Haggard Quotes

60 Sourced Quotes

So they crucified their Messiah? Well can I believe it. That He was a Son of the Living Spirit would be naught to them, if indeed He was so.... They would care little for any God if he came not with pomp and power.

H. Rider Haggard
Slowly the sun sank, then suddenly darkness rushed down on the land like a tangible thing. There was no breathing-space between the day and night, no soft transformation scene, for in these latitudes twilight does not exist. The change from day to night is as quick and as absolute as the change from life to death.

H. Rider Haggard
The 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
It is awkward to listen to oneself being praised, and I was always a shy man.

H. Rider Haggard
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
It is easier to destroy knowledge, Ignosi, than to gather it.

H. Rider Haggard
Out of the dark we came, into the dark we go…Life is nothing. Life is all. It is the hand with which we hold off death. It is the glow-worm that shines in the night-time and is black in the morning; it is the white breath of the oxen in winter; it is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself at sunset.

H. Rider Haggard
The great wheel of Fate rolls on like a Juggernaut, and crushes us all in turn, some soon, some late

H. Rider Haggard
The acorn of ambition often grows into an oak from which men hang.

H. Rider Haggard
Ah! how little knowledge does a man acquire in his life. He gathers it up like water, but like water it runs between 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!' Is it not so?

H. Rider Haggard
I have never observed that the religious are more eager to die than the rest of us poor mortals.

H. Rider Haggard
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
It is far. But there is no journey upon this earth that a man may not make if he sets his heart to it. There is nothing, Umbopa, that he cannot do, there are no mountains he may not climb, there are no deserts he cannot cross; save a mountain and a a desert of which you are spared the knowledge, if love leads him and he holds his life in his hand counting it as nothing, ready to keep it or to lose it as Providence may order.

H. Rider Haggard
The 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
It is curious to look back and realize upon what trivial and apparently coincidental circumstances great events frequently turn as easily and naturally as a door on its hinges.

H. Rider Haggard
There is no such things as magic, though there is such a thing as knowledge of the hidden ways of Nature.

H. Rider Haggard
Passion is like the lightning, it is beautiful, and it links the earth to heaven, but alas it blinds!

H. Rider Haggard
It is not wise to neglect the present for the future, for who knows what the future will be?

H. Rider Haggard
Man's cleverness is almost indefinite, and stretches like an elastic band, but human nature is like an iron ring. You can go round and round it, you can polish it highly, you can even flatten it a little on one side, whereby you will make it bulge out the other, but you will NEVER, while the world endures and man is man, increase its total circumference.

H. Rider Haggard
It is a well-known fact that very often, putting the period of boyhood out of the argument, the older we grow the more cynical and hardened we become; indeed, many of us are only saved by timely death from moral petrification, if not from moral corruption.

H. Rider Haggard
Everything has an end, if only you live long enough to see it.

H. Rider Haggard
Yea, all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten.

H. Rider Haggard
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
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
Who has not in his great grief felt a longing to look upon the outward features of the universal Mother; to lie on the mountains and watch the clouds drive across the sky and hear the rollers break in thunder on the shore, to let his poor struggling life mingle for a while in her life; to feel the slow beat of her eternal heart, and to forget his woes.

H. Rider Haggard
From the east to the west sped the angels of the Dawn, from sea to sea, from mountain-top to mountain-top, scattering light with both their hands.

H. Rider Haggard
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
Mistrust all men, and slay him whom thou mistrustest overmuch; and as for women, flee from them, for they are evil, and in the end will destroy thee.

H. Rider Haggard
On, on we went, till at last the east began to blush like the cheek of a girl. Then there came faint rays of primrose light, that changed presently to golden bars, through which the dawn glided out across the desert. The stars grew pale and paler still, till at last they vanished; the golden moon waxed wan, and her mountain ridges stood out against her sickly face like the bones on the cheek of a dying man. Then came spear upon spear of light flashing far away across the boundless wilderness, piercing and firing the veils of mist, till the desert was draped in a tremulous golden glow, and it was day.

H. Rider Haggard
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