Graham Greene quote: "You don't bless what you love...It's when you want to love and you can't manage it. You stretch out your hands and you say God forgive me that I can't love but bless this thing anyway...We have to bless what we hate...It would be better to love, but that's not always possible."

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be ex...
GRAHAM GREENE

In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they...
GRAHAM GREENE

I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect - it changes a relation. The man who offers a brib...
GRAHAM GREENE

People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs...
GRAHAM GREENE

People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it need...
GRAHAM GREENE

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unfor...
GRAHAM GREENE

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God bogg...
GRAHAM GREENE

It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.
GRAHAM GREENE

Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.
GRAHAM GREENE

One can't love humanity. One can only love people.
GRAHAM GREENE

If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the U. S. A. , I would certainly cho...
GRAHAM GREENE

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

Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamon...
GRAHAM GREENE

I thought I am kissing pain and pain belongs to You as happiness never does. I love You in Your pain...
GRAHAM GREENE

I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't t...
GRAHAM GREENE

In the act of creation there is always, it seems, an awful selfishness.
GRAHAM GREENE

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

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

Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not agains...
GRAHAM GREENE

It is the story-teller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie ou...
GRAHAM GREENE

Communism, my friend, is more than Marxism, just as Catholicism is more than the Roman Curia. There ...
GRAHAM GREENE

Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of ...
GRAHAM GREENE

He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.
GRAHAM GREENE

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

If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the fai...
GRAHAM GREENE

Failure too is a form of death...
GRAHAM GREENE

His hilarity was like a scream from a crevasse.
GRAHAM GREENE

However great a man's fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a ma...
GRAHAM GREENE

God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed -- that is the meaning o...
GRAHAM GREENE

Sentimentality--that's what we call the sentiment we don't share.
GRAHAM GREENE

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves again...
GRAHAM GREENE

A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to hi...
GRAHAM GREENE

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgi...
GRAHAM GREENE

Cynicism is cheap -- you can buy it at any Monoprix store -- it's built into all poor-quality goods.
GRAHAM GREENE

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that n...
GRAHAM GREENE

When we are not sure, we are alive.
GRAHAM GREENE

He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness -- the sense that is where we really belong.
GRAHAM GREENE

I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect -- it changes a relation. The man who offers a bri...
GRAHAM GREENE

Reality in our century is not something to be faced.
GRAHAM GREENE

We mustn't complain too much of being comedians -- it's an honorable profession. If only we could be...
GRAHAM GREENE

Those who marry God can become domesticated too -- it's just as hum-drum a marriage as all the other...
GRAHAM GREENE

Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or...
GRAHAM GREENE

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim
GRAHAM GREENE

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those, who do not write, compose, or paint ...
GRAHAM GREENE

In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they p...
GRAHAM GREENE

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

...every monologue sooner or later becomes a discussion.
GRAHAM GREENE

Innocence is a kind of insanity
GRAHAM GREENE

He opened the book at random, or so he believed, but a book is like a sandy path which keeps the ind...
GRAHAM GREENE

It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothi...
GRAHAM GREENE

Hate is a lack of imagination.
GRAHAM GREENE

The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for math...
GRAHAM GREENE

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

People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs...
GRAHAM GREENE

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to loo...
GRAHAM GREENE

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to m...
GRAHAM GREENE

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware...
GRAHAM GREENE

There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he ...
GRAHAM GREENE

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all...
GRAHAM GREENE

Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.
GRAHAM GREENE

Wed forgive most things if we knew the facts.
GRAHAM GREENE

They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dan...
GRAHAM GREENE

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
GRAHAM GREENE

Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the int...
GRAHAM GREENE

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

Happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness
GRAHAM GREENE

One of the things which danger does to you after a time is -, well, to kill emotion. I don't think I...
GRAHAM GREENE

My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain...
GRAHAM GREENE

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to ...
GRAHAM GREENE

That whisky priest, I wish we had never had him in the house.
GRAHAM GREENE

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

A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. A...
GRAHAM GREENE

The truth has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians an...
GRAHAM GREENE

You needn't be so scared. Love doesn't end. Just because we don't see each other...
GRAHAM GREENE

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

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

Hatred seems to work on the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not be...
GRAHAM GREENE

I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of...
GRAHAM GREENE

Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust. In a closely beleaguered city every sentry is a potent...
GRAHAM GREENE

Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.
GRAHAM GREENE

How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity...
GRAHAM GREENE

If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to ...
GRAHAM GREENE

Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems...
GRAHAM GREENE

His question reminded me of how easy he had been to deceive, so easy that he seemed to me almost a c...
GRAHAM GREENE

Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or...
GRAHAM GREENE

You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?
GRAHAM GREENE

Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives.
GRAHAM GREENE

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he...
GRAHAM GREENE

To take an Annamite to bed with you is like taking a bird: they twitter and sing on your pillow
GRAHAM GREENE

If one is going to write about war, self respect demands that one
GRAHAM GREENE

Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the int...
GRAHAM GREENE

Media is a word that has come to mean bad journalism
GRAHAM GREENE

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

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

A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority.
GRAHAM GREENE

I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love you. You're my human...
GRAHAM GREENE

Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, why should we? They talk about people...
GRAHAM GREENE

With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end o...
GRAHAM GREENE

This was hell then; it wasn't anything to worry about: it was just his own familiar room.
GRAHAM GREENE

One forgets the dead quite quickly; one doesn't wonder about the dead-what is he doing now, who is h...
GRAHAM GREENE

What are others worth that they have the nerve to sneer at any human being?
GRAHAM GREENE

It's not really much good tearing out a page because you can see the place where it's been torn. [.....
GRAHAM GREENE

All right. All right.' He thought: am I taking to drink too? It seemed to him that he had no shape l...
GRAHAM GREENE

If one knew, he wondered, the facts,
would one have to pity even the planets? If one reached wh...
GRAHAM GREENE

It seemed after all that one never really missed a thing. To be a human being one had to drink the c...
GRAHAM GREENE

What I've done is far worse than murder - that's an act, a blow, a stab, a shot: it's over and done,...
GRAHAM GREENE

Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on ...
GRAHAM GREENE

Men can become twins with age. The past was their common womb; the six months of rain and the six mo...
GRAHAM GREENE

He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness - the sense that is where we really belong.
GRAHAM GREENE

He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had bee...
GRAHAM GREENE

It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn’t the test of man have been carried ou...
GRAHAM GREENE

They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dan...
GRAHAM GREENE

Beauty is like success: we can't love it for long.
GRAHAM GREENE

You must promise me. You can't desire the end without desiring the means.'

Ah, but one ca...
GRAHAM GREENE

A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.
GRAHAM GREENE

When he was young, he had thought love had something to do with understanding, but with age he knew ...
GRAHAM GREENE

We are all resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.
GRAHAM GREENE

In our hearts there is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers ...
GRAHAM GREENE

Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute sil...
GRAHAM GREENE

He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. ...
GRAHAM GREENE

There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped'; growing more miserable with every...
GRAHAM GREENE

We'd forgive most things if we knew the facts.
GRAHAM GREENE

Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.
GRAHAM GREENE

It was like having a box of chocolates shut in the bedroom drawer. Until the box was empty it occupi...
GRAHAM GREENE

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, selfishness, evil -- or ...
GRAHAM GREENE

What will we care for the why and the wherefore?
GRAHAM GREENE

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint c...
GRAHAM GREENE

Death never mattered at those times - in the early days I even used to pray for it: the shattering a...
GRAHAM GREENE

I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can't love and do nothing.
GRAHAM GREENE

I had been afraid of the primitive, had wanted it broken gently, but here it came on us in a breath,...
GRAHAM GREENE

He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied.
GRAHAM GREENE

They are always saying God loves us. If that's love I'd rather have a bit of kindness.
GRAHAM GREENE

A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.
GRAHAM GREENE

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

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to ever...
GRAHAM GREENE

A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never exper...
GRAHAM GREENE

And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality th...
GRAHAM GREENE

She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of m...
GRAHAM GREENE

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

God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed - that is the meaning of...
GRAHAM GREENE

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping...
GRAHAM GREENE

Ordinary life goes on--that has saved many a man's reason.
GRAHAM GREENE

Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets insid...
GRAHAM GREENE

Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the fla...
GRAHAM GREENE

We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness. It’s as if we we...
GRAHAM GREENE

Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more t...
GRAHAM GREENE

But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of...
GRAHAM GREENE

I became aware that our love was doomed; love had turned into a love affair with a beginning and an ...
GRAHAM GREENE

I measured love by the extent of my jealousy.
GRAHAM GREENE

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

You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, te...
GRAHAM GREENE

Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.
GRAHAM GREENE

I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend.
GRAHAM GREENE

There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.
GRAHAM GREENE

When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a...
GRAHAM GREENE

Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy?
GRAHAM GREENE

You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.
GRAHAM GREENE

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector.
GRAHAM GREENE

You put the small thief in prison, but the big thief lives in a palace.
GRAHAM GREENE

Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.
GRAHAM GREENE

What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?
GRAHAM GREENE

My second wife left me because she said I was too ambitious. She didn't realize that it is only the ...
GRAHAM GREENE

If I were writing a novel I would end it here: a novel, I used to think, has to end somewhere, but I...
GRAHAM GREENE

The dead of an army become automatically heroes like the dead of the Church become Martyrs.
GRAHAM GREENE

They think my mother's ashes are marijuana.
GRAHAM GREENE

Poverty is apt to strike suddenly like influenza, it is well to have a few memories of extravagance ...
GRAHAM GREENE

We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, s...
GRAHAM GREENE

Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.
GRAHAM

The main challenge that television presents is that I have a tendency to say things with a great dea...
BRIAN GREENE

No matter how hard you try to teach your cat general relativity, you're going to fail.
BRIAN GREENE

The universe is incredibly wondrous, incredibly beautiful, and it fills me with a sense that there i...
BRIAN GREENE

Our eyes only see the big dimensions, but beyond those there are others that escape detection becaus...
BRIAN GREENE

Black holes, we all know, are these regions where if an object falls in, it can't get out, but t...
BRIAN GREENE

How can a speck of a universe be physically identical to the great expanse we view in the heavens ab...
BRIAN GREENE

Sometimes nature guards her secrets with the unbreakable grip of physical law. Sometimes the true na...
BRIAN GREENE

I believe we owe our young an education that captures the exhilarating drama of science.
BRIAN GREENE

We're on this planet for the briefest of moments in cosmic terms, and I want to spend that time ...
BRIAN GREENE

There's a picture of my dorm room in the college yearbook as the most messy, most disgusting roo...
BRIAN GREENE

My mom says: 'Why aren't you a doctor?' and I'm like, 'I am a doctor!' and s...
BRIAN GREENE

I have long thought that anyone who does not regularly - or ever - gaze up and see the wonder and gl...
BRIAN GREENE

The boldness of asking deep questions may require unforeseen flexibility if we are to accept the ans...
BRIAN GREENE

The bottom line is that time travel is allowed by the laws of physics.
BRIAN GREENE

Intelligence is the ability to take in information from the world and to find patterns in that infor...
BRIAN GREENE

String theory envisions a multiverse in which our universe is one slice of bread in a big cosmic loa...
BRIAN GREENE

I think math is a hugely creative field, because there are some very well-defined operations that yo...
BRIAN GREENE

Being out at work in L.A. is the nicest place to be. You don't get depressed because of the sun ...
SARAH GREENE

I'm a bit of a workaholic. When I feel like I'm not doing something, it drives me insane.
ASHLEY GREENE

I am thrilled yet overwhelmed. There are so many great women athletes, some incredible performances.
NANCY GREENE

If it's not 100 per cent pure maple syrup, it can't be called 'pure maple syrup.'
NANCY GREENE

Rowing provided a place to go, a community where people cared about what I did and what I achieved.
NANCY GREENE

I'm not from a maple producing area and so my maple syrup credentials are very much of the eatin...
NANCY GREENE

I've seen children's eyes light up when I tell them about black holes and the Big Bang.
BRIAN GREENE

We don't need to grow any more. It's not about the numbers at all. It's about the message of the Bib...
ALAN GREENE

There's lots of parking, plenty of parking, but people need to pay attention to the signs of how to ...
ALAN GREENE

There were no big surprises; it's all been good.
ALAN GREENE

We consider them a sponsoring church if they're doing that.
ALAN GREENE

I regularly have bad experiences with oils that are not certified but I have never bought a bad bott...
ALAN GREENE

We understand that not all churches can pull off canceling or relocating a service, ... We still con...
ALAN GREENE

We'll go-ahead with it and see what happens.
ALAN GREENE

Pound for pound, they get higher concentrations of pesticides than adults do.
ALAN GREENE

You don't bless what you love...It's when you want to love and you can't manage it. You stretch out your hands and you say God forgive me that I can't love but bless this thing anyway...We have to bless what we hate...It would be better to love, but that's not always possible.

Graham Greene

Share:

Related

More Graham Greene