Famous Quotes

Quotes by Graham Greene

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Failure too is a form of death.
• Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.
• Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.
• 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?
• In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
• In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
• It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
• Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.
• No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.
• 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.
• Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.
• 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.
• There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
• We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.
• 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.