Words matter. These are the best William Morris Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
We are living in a epoch where there is combat between commercialism, or the system of reckless waste, and communism, or the system of neighbourly common sense.
I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.
Happy as we are, times may alter; we may be bitten with some impulse towards change, and many things may seem too wonderful for us to resist, too exciting not to catch at, if we do not know that they are but phases of what has been before and withal ruinous, deceitful, and sordid.
The reward of labour is life. Is that not enough?
It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience, because words make experience last.
I can’t enter into politico-social subjects with any interest, for on the whole, I see that things are in a muddle, and I have no power or vocation to set them right in ever so little a degree.
I do not want art for a few any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.
Not on one strand are all life’s jewels strung.
How often it consoles me to think of barbarism once more flooding the world, and real feelings and passions, however rudimentary, taking the place of our wretched hypocrisies.
A man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body. Memory and imagination help him as he works.
I don’t remember being taught to read, and by the time I was seven years old, I had read a very great many books, good, bad, and indifferent.
The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.
If you cannot learn to love real art, at least learn to hate sham art and reject it.
It is right and necessary that all should have work to do which shall be worth doing and be of itself pleasant to do, and which should be done under such conditions as would make it neither over-wearisome nor over-anxious.
We shall not be happy unless we live like good animals, unless we enjoy the exercise of the ordinary functions of life: eating, sleeping, loving, walking, running, swimming, riding, sailing.
Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.
Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.
History has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed; art has remembered the people, because they created.
To do nothing but grumble and not to act – that is throwing away one’s life.
