Rebecca West Quotes

212 Sourced Quotes

Nobody ever wrote a good book simply by collecting a number of accurate facts and valid ideas.

Rebecca West
The mind is its own enemy, that fights itself with the innumerable pliant and ineluctable arms of the octopus.

Rebecca West
I believe if people are looking for the truth, the truth of the Christian religion will come out and meet them.

Rebecca West
I have no faith in the sense of comforting beliefs which persuade me that all my troubles are blessings in disguise.

Rebecca West
He does not so much split his infinitives as disembowel them.

Rebecca West
She moved with a slowness that was a sign of richness; cream does not pour quickly.

Rebecca West
It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.

Rebecca West
There is nothing more frightening than the faces of people whom one does not know but who seem to know one, and be amused by one.

Rebecca West
Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts.

Rebecca West
For one cannot serve the national spirit merely by getting a lump in the throat whenever one catches sight of the Union Jack, or by seeing red when a newspaper reports that some foreign power has acted aggressively towards England. These reactions bear the same relation to true love of country that a chance encounter between a man and a woman who meet in the street bears to a happy marriage.

Rebecca West
Every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris.

Rebecca West
The reward for total abstinence from alcohol seems, illogically enough, to be the capacity for becoming intoxicated without it.

Rebecca West
It is not possible that a just God should forgive people who are wicked because another person who was good endured agony by being nailed to a cross.

Rebecca West
Which is it, I wonder, do I talk too much or does it merely seem to people that I talk too much? And which of those alternatives is the most disagreeable?

Rebecca West
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