Graham Greene Quotes

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Graham Greene

Profession : Novelist

Birth : October 2, 1904

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

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

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

Graham Greene

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

Graham Greene

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

Graham Greene

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

Failure too is a form of death.

Graham Greene

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

Graham Greene

In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

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

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

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

Graham Greene

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

Graham Greene

When we are not sure, we are alive.

Graham Greene

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

Graham Greene

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

Graham Greene

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

Graham Greene

A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.

Graham Greene

Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.

Graham Greene

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