Words matter. These are the best Graham Greene Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.
Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.
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.
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.
In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
The world doesn’t make any heroes anymore.
Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil – or else an absolute ignorance.
When we are not sure, we are alive.
God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed – that is the meaning of evolution.
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority.
No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness.
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 Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
Reality in our century is not something to be faced.
Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.
Failure too is a form of death.
In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They are always saying God loves us. If that’s love I’d rather have a bit of kindness.
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.
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.
Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.
Thrillers are like life, more like life than you are.
He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness – the sense that is where we really belong.
Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
