Rebecca West Quotes

212 Sourced Quotes

He belonged to the vast order of human beings who cannot be loyal to their beloved if a stranger jeers.

Rebecca West
Economists are like Aeolian harps, and the sounds that issue from them are determined by the winds that blow.

Rebecca West
I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that is it too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure as a test of value.

Rebecca West
I cannot think that espionage can be recommended as a technique for building an impressive civilisation. It's a lout's game.

Rebecca West
The childhood of the individual and the race is full of fears, and panic-stricken attempts to avert what is feared by placating the gods with painful sacrifices.

Rebecca West
Siegried Sassoon's book is a true work of art. It is an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity that excites the reader.

Rebecca West
After any disturbance (such as two world wars coinciding with a period of growing economic and monetary incomprehensibility) we find our old concepts inadequate and look for new ones. But it unfortunately happens that the troubled times which produce an appetite for new ideas are the least propitious for clear thinking.

Rebecca West
The redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it.

Rebecca West
I read a Finnish novel. It was all about people riding bicycles.

Rebecca West
To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere.

Rebecca West
It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself.

Rebecca West
The air of luxury in Sarajevo has less to do with material goods than with the people. They greet delight here with unreluctant and sturdy appreciation, they are even prudent about it, they will let no drop of pleasure run to waste.

Rebecca West
Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself.

Rebecca West
There was too much hatred in the world; it was manifestly as dangerous as gunpowder, yet people let it lie about, in the way of ignition.

Rebecca West
Charity is an ugly trick. It is a virtue grown by the rich on the graves of the poor. Unless it is accompanied by sincere revolt against the present social system, it is a cheap moral swagger. In former times it was used as fire insurance by the rich, but now that the fear of Hell has gone along with the rest of revealed religion, it is used either to gild mean lives with nobility or as a political instrument.

Rebecca West
His smile bore the same relation to a real smile as false teeth do to real teeth.

Rebecca West
Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.

Rebecca West
It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it.

Rebecca West
She was glad that sometimes, by night, her beauty crawled out of the pit age had dug for it.

Rebecca West
Music is a missionary effort to colonize earth for imperialistic heaven.

Rebecca West
Christianity must be regarded not as a final revelation but as a phase of revelation.

Rebecca West
That certain women were ready to sell themselves caused no excessive disgust in Isabelle. It was inevitable that a number of both men and women should compromise the institution of marriage by marrying for money, and once that happened there could be no question of impressing on the toughly logical female mind the unique vileness of prostitution. She had sometimes wondered, too, whether the contempt men felt for women who market their favors did not in part proceed from from the sense of grievance eternally felt by buyers against vendors.

Rebecca West
The bad is more easily perceived than the good. A fresh lobster does not give such pleasure to the consumer as a stale one will give him pain.

Rebecca West
On their faces lay that plastered, flattened look of loyalty to a cause.

Rebecca West
The case against religion is the responsibility of God for the sufferings of mankind, which makes it impossible to believe the good things said about Him in the Bible, and consequently to believe anything it says about Him.

Rebecca West
My scepticism long ago led me to the belief that writers write for themselves and not for their readers and that art has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.

Rebecca West
Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does nore than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read.

Rebecca West
When the Spaniards persecuted heretics they may have been crude, but they were not being unreasonable or unpractical. They were at least wiser than the people of to-day who pretend that it does not matter what a man believes, as who should say that the flavour and digestibility of a pudding will have nothing to do with its ingredients.

Rebecca West
Existence in itself, taken at its least miraculous, is a miracle.

Rebecca West
Now different races and nationalities cherish different ideals of society that stink in each other's nostrils with an offensiveness beyond the power of any but the most monstrous private deed.

Rebecca West