Rider Haggard She Quotes & Sayings

I closed my eyelids, and imagination, taking up the thread of thought, shot its swift shuttle back across the ages, weaving a picture on their blackness so real and vivid in its details that I could almost for a moment think that I had triumphed o'er the Past, and that my spirit's eyes had pierced the mystery of Time. — H. Rider Haggard

And now it appeared that there was a mysterious Queen clothed by rumour with dread and wonderful attributes, and commonly known by the impersonal but, to my mind, rather awesome title of She. — H. Rider Haggard

Memory haunts me from age to age, and passion leads me by the hand
evil have I done, and with sorrow have I made acquaintance from age to age, and from age to age evil shall I do, and sorrow shall I know till my redemption comes. — H. Rider Haggard

Thinking can only serve to measure out the helplessness of thought. — 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

And it is, by the way, from the presence of others that we really derive support in our dark hours of grief, and not from their talk, which often only serves to irritate us. — H. Rider Haggard

Yet man dies not whilst the world, at once his mother and his monument, remains. His name is lost, indeed, but the breath he breathed still stirs the pine-tops on the mountains, the sound of the words he spoke yet echoes on through space; the thoughts his brain gave birth to we have inherited to-day; his passions are our cause of life; the joys and sorrows that he knew are our familiar friends
the end from which he fled aghast will surely overtake us also!
Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again for ever. — H. Rider Haggard

Surely my lord will not hide his beautiful white legs! exclaimed Infadoos regretfully.
But Good persisted, and once only did the Kukuana people get the chance of seeing his beautiful legs again. Good is a very modest man. Henceforward they had to satisfy their aesthetic longings with his one whisker, his transparent eye, and his movable teeth. — H. Rider Haggard

Strange are the pictures of the future that mankind can thus draw with this brush of faith and these many-coloured pigments of the imagination! Strange, too, that no one of them tallies with another! — H. Rider Haggard

Now, I whispered. Boom! boom! boom! went the three heavy rifles, and down came Sir Henry's elephant dead as a hammer, shot right through the heart. — H. Rider Haggard

By God!' he whispered, drawing his breath in sharply, 'it is all pure Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle. — John Buchan

Shall a man
grave his sorrows upon a stone when he hath but need to write them on
the water? Nay, oh /She/, I will live my day, and grow old with my
generation, and die my appointed death, and be forgotten. — H. Rider Haggard

Whilst we were at Durban he cut off a Kafir's big toe in a way which it was a pleasure to see. But he was quite nonplussed when the Kafir, who had sat stolidly watching the operation, asked him to put on another, saying that a "white one" would do at a pinch. — H. Rider Haggard

The flesh dies, or at least it changes, and its passions pass, but that other passion of the spirit - that longing for oneness - is undying as itself. — H. Rider Haggard

As I grow older, I regret to say that a detestable habit of thinking seems to be getting a hold of me. — H. Rider Haggard

For women bring trouble as surely as night follows day ... — H. Rider Haggard

Good responded nobly to this tax upon his inventive faculties. Never before had I the faintest conception of the breadth and depth and height of a naval officer's objurgatory powers. For ten minutes he went on in several languages without stopping, and he scarcely ever repeated himself. — 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

Vengeance is an arrow that in falling oft pierces him who shot it — H. Rider Haggard

A sharp spear," runs the Kukuana saying, "needs no polish. — H. Rider Haggard

Let him who reads forgive the intrusion of a dream into a history of fact. But it came so home to me - I saw it all so clear in a moment, as it were; and, besides, who shall say what proportion of fact, past, present, or to come, may lie in the imagination? What is imagination? Perhaps it is the shadow of the intangible truth, perhaps it is the soul's thought. — H. Rider Haggard

Love to a woman is what the sun is to the world, it is her life, her animating principle, without which she must droop, and, if the plant be very tender, die. Except under its influence, a woman can never attain her full growth, never touch the height of her possibilities, or bloom into the plenitude of her moral beauty. A loveless marriage dwarfs our natures, a marriage where love is develops them to their utmost. — H. Rider Haggard

Love her who is present, for be sure she who is absent is false to thee; — H. Rider Haggard

For however deep the fall from righteousness, if but repentance holds the heart, there is a path - a stony and a cruel path - whereby the height may be climbed again. — H. Rider Haggard

Women's eyes are always bright, whatever the colour, — H. Rider Haggard

For to my mind, however beautiful a view may be, it requires the presence of man to make it complete, but perhaps that is because I have lived so much in the wilderness, and therefore know the value of civilisation, though to be sure it drives away the game. The Garden of Eden, no doubt, looked fair before man was, but I always think that it must have been fairer when Eve adorned it. To — H. Rider Haggard

Love's empire is this globe and all mankind; the most refined and the most degraded, the cleverest and the most stupid, are all liable to become his faithful subjects. He can alike command the devotion of an archbishop and a South-Sea Islander, of the most immaculate maiden lady (whatever her age) and of the savage Zulu girl. From the pole to the equator, and from the equator to the further pole, there is no monarch like Love. — H. Rider Haggard

Truly wealth, which men spend all their lives in acquiring, is a valueless thing at the last. — H. Rider Haggard

When is truth pleasing? It is only when we clothe it's nakedness with rags of imagination, or sweeten it with fiction, that it can please. — H. Rider Haggard

Oh! ye poor mortals," she went on, with a sudden burst of passion; "ye beseech your gods for the gift of many years, being ignorant that ye would sow a seed within your breasts whence ye must garner ten thousand miseries. Know ye not that this world is indeed the wide house of hell, in whose chambers from time to time the spirit tarries a little while, then, weary and aghast, speeds wailing to the peace that it has won. — H. Rider Haggard

Our future was so completely unknown, and I think that the unknown and the awful always bring a man nearer to his Maker. — H. Rider Haggard

Man doeth this and doeth that from the good or evil of his heart; but he knows not to what end his sense doth prompt him; for when he strikes he is blind to where the blow shall fall, nor can he count the airy threads that weave the web of circumstance. Good and evil, love and hate, night and day, sweet and bitter, man and woman, heaven above and the earth beneath
all those things are needful, one to the other, and who knows the end of each? — H. Rider Haggard

To the young, indeed, death is sometimes welcome, for the young can feel. They love and suffer, and it wrings them to see their beloved pass into the land of shadows. — H. Rider Haggard

For surely 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 chew it. (Ayesha) — H. Rider Haggard

[W.H.R.] Rivers is the Rider Haggard of anthropology; I shall be the Conrad. — Bronislaw Malinowski

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

But what is done is done. Who can make the dead tree green, or gaze again upon last year's light? Who can recall the spoken word, or bring back the spirit of the fallen? That which Time swallows comes not up again. Let it be forgotten! — H. Rider Haggard

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

Another minute passed, when suddenly something round fell with a soft but heavy thud upon the stone flooring of the veranda, and came bounding and rolling along past me. For a moment I did not rise, but sat wondering what it could be. Finally, I concluded it must have been an animal. Just then, however, another idea struck me, and I got up quick enough. The thing lay quite still a few feet beyond me. I put down my hand towards it and it did not move: clearly it was not an animal. My hand touched it. It was soft and warm and heavy. Hurriedly I lifted it and held it up against the faint starlight. It was a newly severed human head! — H. Rider Haggard

I read all of Rider Haggard's books. For me he had the romance of Africa with a little bit of mysticism. I'm delighted to be looked on as his heir and be categorised as an adventure novelist because that's exactly what I am. — Wilbur Smith