James Hilton Quotes

If you forgive people enough you belong to them, and they to you, whether either person likes it or not squatter's rights of the heart.

Surely there comes a time when counting the cost and paying the price aren't things to think about any more. All that matters is value - the ultimate value of what one does.

I dislike organized games, swimming pools, fashionable resorts, night clubs, music in restaurants, and political manifestoes; I enjoy driving from coast to coast, good food and drink, a few friends, dogs, the theatre, long walks, music and free conversation.

Is there not too much tension in the world at present, and might it not be better if more people were slackers?

if we have not found the heaven within,we have not found the heaven without

If I had a child who wanted to be a teacher, I would bid him Godspeed as if he were going to war. For indeed the war against prejudice, greed, and ignorance is eternal, and those who dedicate themselves to it give their lives no less because they may live to see some fraction of the battle won.

The right mixture of caring and not caring - I suppose that's what love is.

People make mistakes in life through believing too much, but they have a damned dull time if they believe too little.

There's only one thing more important... and that is, after you've done what you set out to do, to feel that it's been worth doing.

Laziness in doing stupid things can be a great virtue.

What a host of little incidents, all deep-buried in the past -- problems that had once been urgent, arguments that had once been keen, anecdotes that were funny only because one remembered the fun. Did any emotion really matter when the last trace of it had vanished from human memory; and if that were so, what a crowd of emotions clung to him as to their last home before annihilation? He must be kind to them, must treasure them in his mind before their long sleep.

And I believe that the Binomial Theorem and a Bach Fugue are, in the long run, more important than all the battles of history.

We believe that to govern perfectly it is necessary to avoid governing too much.

This storm you talk of . . .t will be such a one, my son, as the world has not seen before. There will be no safety by arms, no help from authority, no answer in science. It will rage till every flower of culture is trampled, and all human things are leveled in a vast chaos.

There are times in life when the most comfortable thing is to do nothing at all. Things happen to you and you just let them happen.

The first quarter-century of your life was doubtless lived under the cloud of being too young for things, while the last quarter-century would normally be shadowed by the still darker cloud of being too old for them; and between those two clouds, what small and narrow sunlight illumines a human lifetime!

The exhaustion of the passions is the beginning of wisdom.

When you are getting on in years (but not ill, of course), you get very sleepy at times, and the hours seem to pass like lazy cattle moving across a landscape.

When it comes to believing things without actual evidence, we all incline to what we find most attractive.

In a small cathedral town where changes are few, there are always people who remember who used to live in a particular house, what happened to them there and afterwards, and so on.

It's a very remarkable story." "Remarkable's a well-chosen word. It doesn't give you away.

You will have Time, that rare and lovely gift that your Western countries have lost the more they have pursued it.

Have you ever been going somewhere with a crowd and you're certain it's the wrong road and you tell them, but they won't listen, so you just have to plod along in what you know is the wrong direction till somebody more important gets the same idea?