John Galsworthy

Name: The Island Pharisees — Preface
Author: John Galsworthy

The Island Pharisees — Preface (1904)

Summary

“The Island Pharisees — Preface”, published in 1904, is a work by John Galsworthy. It explores elements such as courage, Shelton and road.

Quotes from The Island Pharisees — Preface (John Galsworthy)

John Galsworthy, The Island Pharisees — Preface (1904)

“ Each man born into the world is born like Shelton in this book—to go a journey, and for the most part he is born on the high road. At first he sits there in the dust, with his little chubby hands reaching at nothing, and his little solemn eyes staring into space. As soon as he can toddle, he moves, by the queer instinct we call the love of life, straight along this road, looking neither to the right nor left, so pleased is he to walk. And he is charmed with everything—with the nice flat road, all broad and white, with his own feet, and with the prospect he can see on either hand. ”

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Source: Wikisource

John Galsworthy, The Island Pharisees — Preface (1904)

“ Nine times out of ten that courage fails, and he goes down into the bog. He has seen the undiscovered, and—like Ferrand in this book—the undiscovered has engulfed him; his spirit, tougher than the spirit of the nine that burned back to sleep in inns, was yet not tough enough. The tenth time he wins across, and on the traces he has left others follow slowly, cautiously—a new road is opened to mankind! A true saying goes: Whatever is, is right! And if all men from the world's beginning had said that, the world would never have begun—at all. ”

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Source: Wikisource

John Galsworthy, The Island Pharisees — Preface (1904)

“ The sun shines, and he finds the road a little hot and dusty; the rain falls, and he splashes through the muddy puddles. It makes no matter—all is pleasant; his fathers went this way before him; they made this road for him to tread, and, when they bred him, passed into his fibre the love of doing things as they themselves had done them. ”

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Source: Wikisource

John Galsworthy, The Island Pharisees — Preface (1904)

“ The ninety desiring peace and comfort for their spirit, the ninety of the well-warmed beds, will have it that the fashions need not change, that morality is fixed, that all is ordered and immutable, that every one will always marry, play, and worship in the way that they themselves are marrying, playing, worshipping. They have no speculation, and they hate with a deep hatred those who speculate with thought. ”

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Source: Wikisource

John Galsworthy, The Island Pharisees — Preface (1904)

“ One of the greatest charms of authorship is the privilege it gives the author of studying the secret springs of many unseen persons, of analysing human nature through the criticism that his work evokes—criticism welling out of the instinctive likings or aversions, out of the very fibre of the human being who delivers it ”

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Source: Wikisource

John Galsworthy, The Island Pharisees — Preface (1904)

“ Thus, in the subdivision of the poultry-run that we call England, the proportion of the others to the complete male-bird spirit, who, of course, is not infrequently a woman, is ninety-nine to one; and with every Island Pharisee, when he or she starts out in life, the interesting question ought to be, "Am I that one?" ”

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Source: Wikisource

John Galsworthy, The Island Pharisees — Preface (1904)

“ But, because It knew that if all the male-bird spirits were complete, the proportion of male to female—one to ten—would be too great, and cause upheavals, It so arranged that only one in ten male-bird spirits should have all three kinds of courage ”

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Source: Wikisource

John Galsworthy, The Island Pharisees — Preface (1904)

“ Slowly but surely they wear out, or are outgrown; and in their fashion they are always thirty years at least behind the fashions of those spirits who are concerned with what shall take their place. The conditions that dictate our education, the distribution of our property, our marriage laws, amusements, worship, prisons, and all other things, change imperceptibly from hour to hour ”

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Source: Wikisource

John Galsworthy, The Island Pharisees — Preface (1904)

“ They are the dough, and they dislike that yeasty stuff of life which comes and works about in them. The Yeasty Stuff—the other ten—chafed by all things that are, desirous ever of new forms and moulds, hate in their turn the comfortable ninety. Each party has invented for the other the hardest names that it can think of: Philistines, Bourgeois, Mrs. ”

John Galsworthy

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Quotes from The Island Pharisees — Preface (John Galsworthy)

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