Top 90 John Knowles Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Sarcasm is the protest of the weak.”

— John Knowles

2. “You have to do what you think is the right thing, but just make sure it’s the right thing in the long run, and not just for the moment.”

— John Knowles

3. “The next major advance in the health of the American people will be determined by what the individual is willing to do for himself.”

— John Knowles

4. “Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.”

— John Knowles

5. “What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.”

— John Knowles

Featured in: Winter Quotes

6. “Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him.”

— John Knowles

7. “So the more things stay the same, the more they change after all.”

— John Knowles

8. “There are special, strange gifted people in the world and they have to be treated with understanding.”

— John Knowles

9. “There was no harm in taking aim, even if the target was a dream.”

— John Knowles

10. “Peace is indivisible, and the surrounding world confusion found no reflection inside me.”

— John Knowles

11. “As I said, this was my sarcastic summer. It was only long after that I recognized sarcasm as the protest of people who are weak.”

— John Knowles

12. “Looking back now across fifteen years I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it.”

— John Knowles

13. “As I walked briskly out the road the wind knifed at my face, but this sun caressed the back of my neck.”

— John Knowles

14. “Never say you are five feet nine when you are five feet eight and a half.”

— John Knowles

15. “So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all- plus c’est la meme, plus ca change.”

— John Knowles

16. “I did no know everything there was to know about myself, and knew that I did not know it.”

— John Knowles

17. “Times change, and wars change. But men don’t change, do they?”

— John Knowles

18. “I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.”

— John Knowles

19. “But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.”

— John Knowles

20. “I began to know that each morning reasserted the problems of night before, that sleep suspended all but changed nothing, that you couldn’t make yourself over between dawn and dusk.”

— John Knowles

21. “I knew that part of friendship consisted in accepting a friend’s shortcomings, which sometimes included his parents.”

— John Knowles

22. “It wasn’t the cider which made me surpass myself, it was this liberation we had torn from the gray encroachments of 1943, the escape we had concocted, this afternoon of momentary, illusory, special and separate peace.”

— John Knowles

23. “But I was used to finding something deadly in things that attracted me; there was always something deadly lurking in anything I wanted, anything I loved.”

— John Knowles

24. “It was partly his doing. The Devon faculty had never before experienced a student who combined a calm ignorance of the rules with a winning urge to be good, who seemed to love the school truly and deeply, and never more than when he was breaking the regulations, a model boy who was most comfortable in the truant’s corner. The faculty threw up its hands over Phineas, and so loosened its grip on all of us.”

— John Knowles

25. “Teenagers today are more free to be themselves and to accept themselves.”

— John Knowles

26. “I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case.”

— John Knowles

27. “Always say some prayers at night because it might turn out that there is a God.”

— John Knowles

28. “You know what? I’m almost glad this war came along. It’s like a test, isn’t it, and only the things and the people who’ve been evolving the right way survive.”

— John Knowles

29. “We spent that summer in complete selfishness, I’m happy to say. The people in the world who could be selfish in the summer of 1942 were a small band, and I’m glad we took advantage of it.”

— John Knowles

30. “All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way-if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.”

— John Knowles

31. “I believe you. It’s okay because I understand and I believe you. You’ve already shown me and I believe you.”

— John Knowles

32. “Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence.”

— John Knowles

33. “I had to be right in never talking about what you could not change, and I had to make many people agree that I was right. None of them ever accused me of being responsible for what had happened to Phineas, either because they could not believe it or because they could not understand it. I would have talked about that, but they would not, and I would not talk about Phineas in any other way.”

— John Knowles

34. “Phineas didn’t really dislike West Point in particular or authority in general, but just considered authority the necessary evil against which happiness was achieved by reaction, the backboard which returned all the insults he threw at it.”

— John Knowles

35. “Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men.”

— John Knowles

36. “Until now, in spite of everything, I had welcomed each new day as though it were a new life, where all past failures and problems were erased, and all future possibilities and joys open and available, to be achieved probably before night fell again. Now, in this winter of snow and crutches with Phineas, I began to know that each morning reasserted the problems of the night before, that sleep suspended all but changed nothing, that you couldn’t make yourself over between dawn and dusk.”

— John Knowles

37. “Gene, on the desire to be Finny: “I lost part of myself to him then, and a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become a part of Phineas.”

— John Knowles

38. “Finny always said what he happened to be thinking, and if this stunned people then he was surprised.”

— John Knowles

39. “There are just tiny fragments of pleasure and luxury in the world, and there is something unpatriotic about enjoying them.”

— John Knowles

40. “I never killed anybody and I never developed an intense level of hatred for the enemy. Because my war ended before I ever put on a uniform; I was on active duty all my time at school; I killed my enemy there.”

— John Knowles

41. “I jounced the limb.”

— John Knowles

42. “Under the influence not I know of he hardest cider but of his own inner joy at life for a moment as it should be, as it was meant to be in his nature, Phineas recaptured that magic gift for existing primarily in space, one foot conceding briefly to gravity its rights before spinning him off again into the air. It was his wildest demonstration of himself, of himself in the kind of world he loved; it was his choreography of peace.”

— John Knowles

43. “I realized that all this explained him, and it wasn’t the words he said which angered me. It was only that he was so ignorant, that he knew nothing of the gypsy summer, nothing of the loss I was fighting to endure, of skylarks and splashes and petal-bearing breezes, he had not seen Leper’s snails or the Charter of the Super Suicide Society; he shared nothing, knew nothing, felt nothing as Phineas had done.”

— John Knowles

44. “Life is fighting. In life, it’s the look ahead that counts. We are all born equally far from the sun. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love.”

— John Knowles

45. “I could never agree with either of them. It would have been comfortable, but I could not believe it. Because it seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart.”

— John Knowles

46. “The winter loves me,” he retorted, and then, disliking the whimsical sound of that, added, “I mean as much as you can say a season can love. What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.”

— John Knowles

47. “It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart.”

— John Knowles

48. “Dr. Stanpole’s car was at the top of it, headlights on and motor running, empty. I idly considered stealing it, in the way that people idly consider many crimes it would be possible for them to commit.”

— John Knowles

49. “The Master was slipping from his official position momentarily, and it was just possible, if Phineas pressed hard enough, that there might be a flow of simple, unregulated friendliness between them, and such flows were one of Finny’s reasons for living.”

— John Knowles

50. “Phineas just walked serenely on, or rather flowed on, rolling forward in his white sneakers with such unthinking unity of movement that “walk” didn’t describe it.”

— John Knowles