Top 400 Graham Greene Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.”

— Graham Greene

2. “Most things disappoint till you look deeper.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

Featured in: Quotes About Trust

4. “There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.”

— Graham Greene

5. “People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations.”

— Graham Greene

6. “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

Featured in: Depression Quotes

7. “A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.”

— Graham Greene

8. “Hate is a lack of imagination.”

— Graham Greene

9. “Destruction after all is a form of creation.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

11. “We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us.”

— Graham Greene

12. “There’s a virtue in slowness, which we have lost.”

— Graham Greene

13. “Innocence is a kind of insanity.”

— Graham Greene

14. “A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”

— Graham Greene

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Graham Greene

16. “One can’t love humanity. One can only love people.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

18. “In our hearts there is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers if it will ensure the happiness of the few we love.”

— Graham Greene

19. “It’s a good world if you don’t weaken.”

— Graham Greene

20. “So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them.”

— Graham Greene

21. “Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.”

— Graham Greene

22. “Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.”

— Graham Greene

23. “O God, You’ve done enough, You’ve robbed me of enough, I’m too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

25. “You needn’t be so scared. Love doesn’t end. Just because we don’t see each other...”

— Graham Greene

26. “Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.”

— Graham Greene

27. “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

28. “You put the small thief in prison, but the big thief lives in a palace.”

— Graham Greene

29. “Sweet are the thoughts that savor of content: the quiet mind is richer than a crown.”

— Graham Greene

30. “When we are not sure, we are alive.”

— Graham Greene

31. “With Your great schemes, You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse’s nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.”

— Graham Greene

32. “She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn’t be spoken aloud when you are happy.”

— Graham Greene

33. “Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.”

— Graham Greene

34. “Pain is easy to write. In pain we’re all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?”

— Graham Greene

35. “God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed – that is the meaning of evolution.”

— Graham Greene

36. “Thought’s a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

38. “The world doesn’t make any heroes anymore.”

— Graham Greene

39. “I say that home is where there is a chair and a glass.”

— Graham Greene

40. “In the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.”

— Graham Greene

41. “Childhood is the writer’s bank balance.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

43. “Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.”

— Graham Greene

44. “Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt.”

— Graham Greene

45. “He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one’s hands altogether by death.”

— Graham Greene

46. “I thought I am kissing pain and pain belongs to You as happiness never does. I love You in Your pain. I could almost taste metal and salt in the skin, and I thought, How good you are. You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain.”

— Graham Greene

47. “As long as nothing happens anything is possible...”

— Graham Greene

48. “He said, ‘Oh god, help her. Damn me, I deserve it, but let her live forever.’ This was the love he should have felt for every soul in the world: all the fear and the wish to save concentrated unjustly on the one child. He began to weep... He thought: This is what I should feel all the time for everyone.”

— Graham Greene

49. “It’s 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.”

— Graham Greene

50. “I’ve caught belief like a disease. I’ve fallen into belief like I fell in love.”

— Graham Greene