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.

Graham Greene

Categorized in : School Two Differences

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

fear depression love

Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt

Graham Greene

worst-enemy intelligent simple

Hate is a lack of imagination.

Graham Greene

hate imagination acceptance

People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations

Graham Greene

generalization meaningless people

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

Graham Greene

spiritual inspirational love

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

Graham Greene

moments stories looks

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.

Graham Greene

pain identity happiness

He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.

Graham Greene

good-intentions intention ignorance

In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

Graham Greene

thousand kindness lying

When he was young, he had thought love had something to do with understanding, but with age he knew that no human being understood another. Love was the wish to understand, and presently with constant failure the wish died, and love died too perhaps or changed into this painful affection, loyalty, pity.

Graham Greene

loyalty understanding love

Sweet are the thoughts that savor of content: the quiet mind is richer than a crown.

Graham Greene

great-inspirational mind sweet

A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.

Graham Greene

daring conception whole

...every monologue sooner or later becomes a discussion.

Graham Greene

monologues discussion sooner-or-later

One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.

Graham Greene

falling-in-love pain father

Perhaps the sexual life is the great test. If we can survive it with charity to those we love and with affection to those we have betrayed, we needn't worry so much about the good and the bad in us. But jealousy, distrust, cruelty, revenge, recrimination ... then we fail. The wrong is in that failure even if we are the victims and not the executioners. Virtue is no excuse.

Graham Greene

tests revenge worry

When we are not sure, we are alive.

Graham Greene

doubt inspirational life

Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.

Graham Greene

response hate fear

The hands of the guilty don't necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action.

Graham Greene

glasses guilt hands

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.

Graham Greene

strange space time

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

honesty truth kindness