Top 60 Taylor Caldwell Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I am deeply convinced that happiness does not exist in this world.”

— Taylor Caldwell

2. “Don’t let the past steal your present. This is the message of Christmas: We are never alone.”

— Taylor Caldwell

3. “I am not alone at all, I thought. I was never alone at all. And that, of course, is the message of Christmas. We are never alone. Not when the night is darkest, the wind coldest, the world seemingly most indifferent. For this is still the time God chooses.”

— Taylor Caldwell

4. “Obscurity can be a fire of ambition in those who have stalwart souls.”

— Taylor Caldwell

5. “The stalwart soul has the will to live and is eager for the race.”

— Taylor Caldwell

6. “Tel Aviv appeals to me.”

— Taylor Caldwell

7. “Corrupt citizens breed corrupt rulers, and it is the mob who finally decides when virtue shall die.”

— Taylor Caldwell

8. “An evil man was more bearable to the majority of men than a good man, who was a constant reproach and therefore to be despised.”

— Taylor Caldwell

9. “Animals do not betray; they do not exploit; they do not oppress; they do not enslave; they do not sin. They have their being, and their being is honest, and who can say this of man?”

— Taylor Caldwell

10. “People are scared to death of dying. I am the opposite.”

— Taylor Caldwell

11. “God’s ‘failures’ are really man’s failures...”

— Taylor Caldwell

12. “It is not always wise to appear singular.”

— Taylor Caldwell

13. “I have been constantly betrayed and deceived all my life.”

— Taylor Caldwell

14. “The world is a penal institution.”

— Taylor Caldwell

15. “I’ve always enjoyed poor health.”

— Taylor Caldwell

16. “Though I am a Catholic, a professing one, I have serious doubts about the survival of the human personality after death.”

— Taylor Caldwell

17. “It is human nature to instinctively rebel at obscurity or ordinariness.”

— Taylor Caldwell

18. “Women’s Lib? I couldn’t stand it.”

— Taylor Caldwell

19. “Republics never survive, for their people do not like freedom but prefer to be led and guided and flattered and seduced into slavery by a benevolent, or not so, benevolent despot. They want to worship Caesar. So, American republicanism will inevitably die and become a democracy, and then decline, as Aristotle said into a despotism.”

— Taylor Caldwell

20. “What is it Aristotle said? ‘Republics decline into democracies, and democracies degenerate into despotisms.’ Yes. Populism is becoming popular in America – an old doctrine, though its adherents invariably think it is a new one, age after age.”

— Taylor Caldwell

21. “Freedom was given to humanity by God. But, governments, if they can help it, never give freedom. They just hand out slavery with slogans.”

— Taylor Caldwell

22. “If a nation has not God that nation must fall, but if a nation has God then all the powers of evil, and all the armies, cannot shake its foundations; no, not even if the whole world is arrayed against it.”

— Taylor Caldwell

23. “Giving a phenomenon a label does not explain it.”

— Taylor Caldwell

24. “There is nothing stronger and nobler than when man and wife are of one heart and mind in a house. A grief to their foes, and to their friends great joy. But their own hearts know it best.”

— Taylor Caldwell

25. “I gratefully look forward to oblivion, but I must be sure of it.”

— Taylor Caldwell

26. “An honest politician is either a hypocrite – or he is doomed.”

— Taylor Caldwell

27. “When you are young you believe the world is all yours, glorious and exhilarating and fascinating and full of promise and trumpets and drums and marches and new worlds,” said Charles. “We don’t ask ourselves what we are living for then. We know. But we forget, later, or it all seems a foolish dream.”

— Taylor Caldwell

28. “But what was a body? Dust, dung, urine, itches. It was the light within which was important, and it was not significant if that light endured after death, or if the soul was blinded eternally in the endless night of the suspired flesh.”

— Taylor Caldwell

29. “Honest men live on charity in their age; the almshouses are full of men who never stole a copper penny. Honest men are the fools and the saints.”

— Taylor Caldwell

30. “My life has been tragic and disastrous since birth.”

— Taylor Caldwell

31. “It is a stern fact of history that no nation that rushed to the abyss ever turned back. Not ever, in the long history of the world. We are now on the edge of the abyss. Can we, for the first time in history, turn back? It is up to you.”

— Taylor Caldwell

32. “Men who retain irony are not to be trusted. They can’t always resist an impulse to tickle themselves.”

— Taylor Caldwell

33. “People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.”

— Taylor Caldwell

34. “A wise man distrusts his neighbor. A wiser man distrusts both his neighbor and himself. The wisest man of all distrusts his government.”

— Taylor Caldwell

35. “Mankind adores its betrayers, and murders its saviors.”

— Taylor Caldwell

36. “Despair is sometimes the great energizer of the mind, though sometimes its flowering may be sterile.”

— Taylor Caldwell

37. “I never deviated from my grim determination to someday have all the money I needed and wanted.”

— Taylor Caldwell

38. “I converse with my dog through ESP.”

— Taylor Caldwell

39. “Reading, not just an escape, but an exercise in living...”

— Taylor Caldwell

Featured in: Reading Quotes

40. “The more wants a man has, the less freedom.”

— Taylor Caldwell

41. “I am the skeptic of skeptics.”

— Taylor Caldwell

42. “If genetic memory or racial memory persists, is it possible that individual memory also exists from previous lives?”

— Taylor Caldwell

43. “Piety without joy, faith without cheer, duty without pleasure, prayer without delight – these do not please the Lord God.”

— Taylor Caldwell

44. “I loved you and reverenced you, for teachers are the noblest of men and labor for little and only from the fullness of their unselfish souls. In your name, and in my memory of you, I will do the best I can, and remember you always.”

— Taylor Caldwell

45. “Money? I lost all taste for it.”

— Taylor Caldwell

46. “One of my grandsons used to insist, when he was only 3 or 4, that he had been born and had lived in India.”

— Taylor Caldwell

47. “We all feel inadequate very often. It’s only when it gets chronic that it is disturbing to one’s emotions and can get out of hand and make you pretty damn miserable.”

— Taylor Caldwell

48. “Even the most malignant gods would not continue to inflict life upon humanity, time without end.”

— Taylor Caldwell

49. “No woman has ever been an authentic genius of the stature of men, but that does not enrage me.”

— Taylor Caldwell

50. “My literary success meant nothing to me.”

— Taylor Caldwell