Words matter. These are the best Rebecca West Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself.
A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.
Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves.
Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts.
International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.
Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.
Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.
Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.
Journalism: an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space.
The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.
The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.
It is always one’s virtues and not one’s vices that precipitate one into disaster.
The American struggle for the vote was much more difficult than the English for the simple reason that it was much more easy.
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.
There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.
Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person’s mind.
A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
It is the soul’s duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.
We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.
Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.
Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
