Quotes by Graham Greene

“There are none more abusive to others than they that lie most open to it themselves; but the humor goes round, and he that laughs at me today will have somebody to laugh at him tomorrow”

“When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity -- that was a quality Gods image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the thape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”

Its a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.

Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.

If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad that my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.

I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one cant love and do nothing.

I dont care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I dont think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, arent there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?

I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love you. Youre my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does, so that one all the time is loving something different and yet the same. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here.

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.

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

Thoughts a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?

What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness.

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. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

Ο θάνατος είναι πάντα από μόνος του μια απόδειξη ειλικρίνειας.

I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.

You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.

If I stopped loving Him, I would cease to believe in His love. If I loved God, then I would believe in His love for me. Its not enough to need it. We have to love first, and I dont know how. But I need it, how I need it.

How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadnt even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.

Oh, the priest said, thats another thing altogether - God is love. I dont say the heart doesnt feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldnt recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - Gods love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didnt it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.