Graham Greene Quotes
"In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!"
- Graham Greene
(Related: Love, Peace, Democracy, Years)
"Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Dumb, Harm, Innocence, Meaning, World)
"It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Life)
"Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Journalism, Media, Word)
"Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Wisdom, Age, Morality, Curiosity, Sense)
"If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?"
- Graham Greene
(Related: Faith)
"No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Happiness, Being)
"In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Kindness, Lies, Relationships, Worth)
"My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Pen)
"Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast."
- Graham Greene
(Related: War, Successful, Wage)
"I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect - it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Effect, Importance, Man, Woman)
"A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Man, World)
"Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Dumb, Harm, Innocence, Meaning, Protection, World)
"A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Superiority)
"Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Truth, Lie, Challenge, Lies, Man)
"Failure too is a form of death."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Death, Failure)
"God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed - that is the meaning of evolution."
- Graham Greene
(Related: God, Evolution, Meaning, Possibilities)
"He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness - the sense that is where we really belong."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Loyalty, Sense, Unhappiness)
"A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Spirit)
"Heresy is another word for freedom of thought."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Thought, Freedom, Heresy, Word)
"A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Truth, Fiction, Reason, Trying)
"When we are not sure, we are alive."
- Graham Greene
"The world doesn't make any heroes anymore."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Heroes, World)
"The world is not black and white. More like black and grey."
- Graham Greene
(Related: World)
"We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Life)
"There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Childhood, Future)
"They are always saying God loves us. If that's love I'd rather have a bit of kindness."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Love, God, Kindness, Saying)
"The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties."
- Graham Greene
(Related: People, Being, Listening, Word, Writer)
"Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years."
- Graham Greene
(Related: End, Unhappiness, Years)
"The truth has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Truth, Being, Kindness, Lies, Mathematicians, Symbol, Value, Worth)
"Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Success, Failure)
"Sentimentality - that's what we call the sentiment we don't share."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Sentiment, Sentimentality)
"People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Men, People, Courage, Misery, Needs, Talk, Walking)
"Reality in our century is not something to be faced."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Reality)
"The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Economy, Housewife)
"Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else an absolute ignorance."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Egotism, Evil, Ignorance, Man, Selfishness, Will)
"The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Thought, Character)
"Thrillers are like life, more like life than you are."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Life)
"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Fear, Madness, Therapy, Wonder, Writing)