Top 60 Storm Jameson Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The only way to live is to accept each minute as an unrepeatable miracle, which is exactly what it is: a miracle and unrepeatable.”

— Storm Jameson

2. “Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.”

— Storm Jameson

3. “There is only one world; the world pressing against you at this minute. There is only one minute in which you are alive; this minute here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.”

— Storm Jameson

4. “I am never happier than when I am alone in a foreign city; it is as if I had become invisible.”

— Storm Jameson

5. “Lord, if there is a heartache Vienna cannot cure I hope never to feel it. I came home cured of everything except Vienna.”

— Storm Jameson

6. “Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present.”

— Storm Jameson

7. “The older I grow the more sharply I mistrust words. So few of them have any meaning left. It is impossible to write one sentence in which every word has the bareness and hardness of bones, the reality of the skeleton.”

— Storm Jameson

8. “For what I have received may the Lord make me truly thankful. And more truly for what I have not received.”

— Storm Jameson

9. “Language is memory and metaphor.”

— Storm Jameson

10. “An animal is not cruel; it lives wholly in the instant leap on its prey, in the present taste of marrow or blood. Cruelty begins with the memory, and the pleasures of the memory are impure; they draw their strength along levels where no sun has reached.”

— Storm Jameson

11. “The critic’s hankering to be law-giver rather than servant of literature is irrepressible.”

— Storm Jameson

12. “Sadistic literature is not only inhumane. It is anti-human.”

— Storm Jameson

13. “Great advertising is the expression of deep emotional sincerity.”

— Storm Jameson

14. “There is only one world the world pressing against you this minute.”

— Storm Jameson

15. “She did not so much cook as assassinate food.”

— Storm Jameson

16. “The hunger of the spirit for eternity – as fierce as a starving man’s for bread – is much less a craving to go on living than a craving for redemption. Oh, and a protest against absurdity.”

— Storm Jameson

17. “One of the uncovenanted benefits of living for a long time is that, having so many more dead than living friends, death can appear as a step backwards into the joyous past...”

— Storm Jameson

18. “Hope is a talent like any other.”

— Storm Jameson

19. “Nothing lasts. Not even a great sorrow.”

— Storm Jameson

20. “Failures to love are irremediable and irredeemable.”

— Storm Jameson

21. “Very rare, the intelligence of the heart. The intelligence of the whimsical brain is less rare, less attaching, sometimes tedious.”

— Storm Jameson

22. “War, for any cause, is inexcusable. There is nothing which excuses us for the beastly ingenuity of our wars. Only fools, only the diseased, think that we are served by killing the strong young men with machines.”

— Storm Jameson

Featured in: Strong Quotes

23. “A politician is forced to make a habit of noble phrases and optimistic lies. In the end they infect himself.”

— Storm Jameson

24. “All pornography is to a degree sadistic – inevitably.”

— Storm Jameson

25. “Language is one of the thin walls humanity has built up over centuries against its own bestial and destructive impulses...”

— Storm Jameson

26. “The strangest thing about life is not its frightful cruelty, but that it can be gentle.”

— Storm Jameson

27. “If you think with enough energy about a hoped-for event, it will in the end happen. Not because you willed it. Because it was all the time in your nature.”

— Storm Jameson

28. “Writers sometimes talk as though they were the only friends of civilization. This is their conceit. But they have special powers to serve – or to corrupt – civilization, and are obliged to use them.”

— Storm Jameson

29. “Surprise will be my last emotion, not fear.”

— Storm Jameson

30. “Speaking the truth, once you have started it, is too exhilarating to draw back.”

— Storm Jameson

31. “The gesture with which one generation guards the next is the movement, and the only time we see it clearly, of life itself.”

— Storm Jameson

32. “You can’t argue with a raging want. You can, but it is useless.”

— Storm Jameson

33. “In Europe, war is a disease which has been in the family for generations: no one is surprised when it makes another leap. Even the patient only attends to it with part of his mind.”

— Storm Jameson

34. “Could anything be absurder than a man? The animal who knows everything about himself – except why he was born and the meaning of his unique existence.”

— Storm Jameson

35. “The least stupid question a man asks in his lifetime is not: Is there a God and is He a god or a devil? But: Brother, why are you killing me?”

— Storm Jameson

36. “A joke is a joke or the image of a truth...”

— Storm Jameson

37. “If the novel is dying, I see no chance that dismembering it will revive it.”

— Storm Jameson

38. “My mind is not suited to go much into company.”

— Storm Jameson

39. “To reject censorship after studying the risks involved is very well. To reject it ex cathedra, in the tones of Calvin pronouncing a dogma, eyes and mind closed to the possible consequences, the even marginally possible, is to make things too comfortable for oneself.”

— Storm Jameson

40. “In France, even heresy rapidly hardens into dogma.”

— Storm Jameson

41. “Pornography is essentially reductive, an exercise in the nothing-but mode, a depersonalizing of the human beings involved, a showing-up of human lust as nothing but an affair of the genitals.”

— Storm Jameson

42. “Nationalism will keep its venom until we succeed in creating an image of the nations of the whole world as so many provinces.”

— Storm Jameson

43. “The writer – more especially the novelist – who has not, at one moment or another, considered his publisher unworthy of him, has still to be conceived.”

— Storm Jameson

44. “There is a stage in any misery when the victim begins to find a deep satisfaction in it.”

— Storm Jameson

45. “If we are to survive on this planet, there must be compromises.”

— Storm Jameson

46. “I do not think about absent persons as often or with such intense longing as I think of places. They lie one below the other in my mind...”

— Storm Jameson

47. “Critics have been amusing themselves for a long time by auscultating fiction for signs of heart failure.”

— Storm Jameson

48. “The past is able to close round certain moments, as if they were seeds, and deliver them again fresh and living in the present.”

— Storm Jameson

49. “The impossible talked of is less impossible from the moment words are laid to it.”

— Storm Jameson

50. “A nation has honor precisely as it has fleas – on this or that body. The statesman who talks of honor – unless he means something else, quite different – is a rogue...”

— Storm Jameson