Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Graham Greene (British Novelist)

Graham Greene (1904–91,) fully Henry Graham Greene, was an English novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and journalist. He is celebrated for his novels and psychological thrillers that take up life’s moralities and amoralities in the context of contemporary political settings.

Born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, Greene was educated at Balliol College, Oxford. He converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism in 1926.

Greene published a book of verse, Babbling April (1925,) while still in Oxford, and followed it with a historical novel, The Man Within (1929.) After that, he produced a series of thrillers he termed “entertainments”—Stamboul Train (1932,) It’s a Battlefield (1934,) England Made Me (1935,) and The Third Man (1949; film starring Orson Welles, 1949.)

Increasingly Greene explored the world of Catholic remorse and redemption in Brighton Rock (1938,) The Power and the Glory (1940,) The Heart of the Matter (1948,) The End of the Affair (1951,) and The Quiet American (1955.)

Greene also wrote verse, travel books, short stories, children’s stories, and plays. His autobiographies are A Sort of Life (1971) and Ways of Escape (1980.)

The English novelist and biographer Norman Sherry wrote the acclaimed biography, The Life of Graham Greene (3 vols., 1989–2005.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Graham Greene

It is the story-teller’s task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.
Graham Greene
Topics: Literature, Books

A treasure is to be valued for its own sake and not for what it will buy.
Graham Greene
Topics: Money

Cynicism is cheap—you can buy it at any Monoprix store—it’s built into all poor-quality goods.
Graham Greene
Topics: Cynicism

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.
Graham Greene
Topics: Journalism, Media

No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness.
Graham Greene
Topics: Self-reliance, Confidence

A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.
Graham Greene
Topics: Murder

In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
Graham Greene
Topics: Deception/Lying, Lies, Lying

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?
Graham Greene
Topics: Faith

Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt.
Graham Greene
Topics: Enemy

Reality in our century is not something to be faced.
Graham Greene
Topics: Reality

It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
Graham Greene
Topics: Trust, Feelings

Communism, my friend, is more than Marxism, just as Catholicism is more than the Roman Curia. There is a mystique as well as a politick. Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.
Graham Greene
Topics: Communism, Socialism

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

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.
Graham Greene
Topics: Journalism, Journalists

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.
Graham Greene
Topics: Innocence

I had very good dentures once. Some magnificent gold work. It’s the only form of jewelry a man can wear that women fully appreciate.
Graham Greene

We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.
Graham Greene
Topics: Death

He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.
Graham Greene
Topics: Lying, Lies, Deception/Lying

We mustn’t complain too much of being comedians—it’s an honorable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed—that’s all. We are bad comedians, we aren’t bad men.
Graham Greene
Topics: Comedy

You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?
Graham Greene
Topics: Difficulty

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.
Graham Greene
Topics: Defects, Corruption

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.
Graham Greene
Topics: Wine, Challenges, Alcohol

Those who marry God can become domesticated too—it’s just as hum-drum a marriage as all the others. The word Love means a formal touch of the lips as in the ceremony of the Mass, and Ave Maria like dearest is a phrase to open a letter. This marriage like the world’s marriages was held together by habits and tastes shared in common between God and themselves—it was God’s taste to be worshipped and their taste to worship, but only at stated hours like a suburban embrace on a Saturday night.
Graham Greene
Topics: Religion

When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity—that was a quality God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.
Graham Greene

He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness—the sense that is where we really belong.
Graham Greene
Topics: Unhappiness, Sadness

God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed—that is the meaning of evolution.
Graham Greene
Topics: Evolution, Meaning

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.
Graham Greene
Topics: Money, Misery

We’d forgive most things if we knew the facts.
Graham Greene
Topics: Determination

His hilarity was like a scream from a crevasse.
Graham Greene
Topics: Jokes, Humor

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.
Graham Greene
Topics: Appearance

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