Graham Greene Quotes

So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.

So much of life [is] a putting-off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing [is] ever lost by delay.

I know one thing you don't. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn't teach you that at school.' Rose didn't answer; the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods--Good and Evil.

She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.

Never presume yours is a better morality.

Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year...death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.

Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding.

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.

Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It's only the middle class who demand to pray in suitable surroundings.

In our hearts there is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers if it will ensure the happiness of the few we love.

Cynicism is cheap - you can buy it at any Monoprix store - it's built into all poor-quality goods.

You don't bless what you love...It's when you want to love and you can't manage it. You stretch out your hands and you say God forgive me that I can't love but bless this thing anyway...We have to bless what we hate...It would be better to love, but that's not always possible.

As the end of the what is called the 'sexual life' the only love which has lasted is the love which has everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.

We'd forgive most things if we knew the facts.

There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared.

A solitary laugh is often a laugh of 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.

Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.

There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.

It's a pity people pick and choose what they learn from the Bible.

As long as one suffers one lives.

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.

It was like having a box of chocolates shut in the bedroom drawer. Until the box was empty it occupied the mind too much.

Indifference and pride look very much alike, and he probably thought I was proud.

It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.

love had turned into "love affair" with a begining and an end.