Graham Greene

Graham Greene

18 quotes

Graham Greene is a British writer and playwright whose words have traveled far beyond their original audience. Their thinking spans from Truth to Failure, revealing a mind that refused to stay in one lane. Discover 23 of Graham Greene's most memorable quotes, ranging across Truth, Failure, Death, Wisdom, and War. Readers often gravitate to this one: "Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline."

“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

War

All Quotes by Graham Greene

“Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.”

— Graham Greene

Nature

“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

Faith

“Failure too is a form of death.”

— Graham Greene

Death

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

— Graham Greene

Happiness

“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

Courage

“Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.”

— Graham Greene

Age

“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

War

“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”

— Graham Greene

Future

“Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.”

— Graham Greene

Freedom

“In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!”

— Graham Greene

Peace

“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

Technology

“In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.”

— Graham Greene

Relationship

“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

Truth

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

— Graham Greene

Death

“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

Truth

“It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.”

— Graham Greene

Trust

“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, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”

— Graham Greene

Fear

“Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.”

— Graham Greene

Failure