Graham Greene Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries? Our Man in Havana

2. I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can't love and do nothing. The End of the Affair

3. If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad that my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.

4. It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love. The End of the Affair

5. Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel. The Comedians

6. Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel. The Comedians

7. Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, selfishness, evil -- or else an absolute ignorance. The Heart of the Matter

8. She couldn't avoid being serious about things she cared for, and happiness made her grave at the thought of all the things which might destroy it. A Gun for Sale

9. She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn't be spoken aloud when you are happy. Loser Takes All

10. 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. The End of the Affair

11. The truth, he thought, 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.

12. You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty 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 five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. The Third Man

13. Ο θάνατος είναι πάντα από μόνος του μια απόδειξη ειλικρίνειας. The Comedians

14. Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

15. Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn't being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love--it's being unhappy together. The Ministry of Fear

16. Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair. The Power and the Glory

17. I can't talk you in terms of time --your time and my time are different

18. 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 name?

19. Knowledge was the great thing--not abstract knowledge in which Dr. Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but detailed, passionate, trivial human knowledge. The Ministry of Fear

20. Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever. The Power and the Glory

21. There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped'; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief. The Heart of the Matter

22. There were occasions when Shakespeare was a very bad writer indeed. You can see how often in books of quotations. People who like quotations love meaningless generalizations. Travels with My Aunt

23. Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night? The Quiet American

24. 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. The Quiet American

25. What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness. The End of the Affair