Graham Greene - Human Quotes

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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
Fun... human nature... does no one any harm... Regular as clockwork the old excuses came back into the alert, sad and dissatisfied brain--nothing ever matched the deep excitement of the regular desire. Men always failed you when it came to the act. She might just as well have been to the pictures.

Graham Greene
No building was safe from the furniture, the pictures, the human beings that it would presently contain.

Graham Greene
It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy—a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.

Graham Greene
If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.

Graham Greene
No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.

Graham Greene
Sooner or later... one has to take sides – if one is to remain human.

Graham Greene
Goodness has only once found a perfect incarnation in a human body and never will again, but evil can always find a home there. Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.

Graham Greene
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, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition.

Graham Greene
That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.

Graham Greene
Its typical of Mexico, of the whole human race perhaps — violence in favour of an ideal and then the ideal lost but the violence just going on.

Graham Greene
Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst; you didn't love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.

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

Graham Greene
It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there.

Graham Greene
It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.

Graham Greene
Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.

Graham Greene
It isn't easy for an author to remain a pleasant human being: both success and failure are usually of a crippling kind.

Graham Greene
Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.

Graham Greene
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.

Graham Greene
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
I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.

Graham Greene
People change,' she said 'Oh, no they don't. Look at me. I've never changed. It's like those sticks of rock: bite it all the way down, you'll still read Brighton. That's human nature.

Graham Greene