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

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, Umbra, that he cannot do, there are no mountains he may not climb, there are no deserts he cannot cross; save a mountain and 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

Man doth this and doth 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

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

Passion is like the lightening, it is beautiful, and it links the earth to heaven, but it blinds.

— H. Rider Haggard

Pride is a good horse if thou rides wisely

— H. Rider Haggard

Shall a mangrove 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

Shot the man! Shed human blood! Hid in a pool!" ejaculated Mr. Dove, overcome. "Really, Rachel, you are a most trying daughter. Why should you go out before daybreak and do such things?

— H. Rider Haggard

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

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

— H. Rider Haggard