Top 400 Graham Greene Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Graham Greene

Featured in: Doubt Quotes

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. “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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

9. “Hate is a lack of imagination.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

11. “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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

14. “Innocence is a kind of insanity.”

— Graham Greene

15. “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

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

— Graham Greene

19. “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

20. “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

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

— Graham Greene

22. “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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

28. “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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

33. “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

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

— Graham Greene

35. “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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

39. “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

40. “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

41. “Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

44. “A writer’s knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime: one volt of it properly directed will bring a character to life.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

46. “Lust is not the worst thing. It is because any day, any time, lust may turn into love that we have to avoid it. And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

49. “I’m tired and I’m sick to death of being without you.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene