Graham Greene - The Heart of the Matter (1948)

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Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil—or else an absolute ignorance.

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

Graham Greene
Men can become twins with age. The past was their common womb; the six months of rain and the six months of sun was the period of their common gestation. They needed only a few words and a few gestures to convey their meaning. They had graduated through the same fevers, they were moved by the same love and contempt.

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

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

Graham Greene
He felt the loyalty we all feel to unhappiness—the sense that that is where we really belong.

Graham Greene
Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.

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
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
He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.

Graham Greene
Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive.

Graham Greene
Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity.

Graham Greene
They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn't name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.

Graham Greene
He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting-off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay.

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

Graham Greene