Top 50 Vera Brittain Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “It never seems to occur to anybody that some women may not want to find husbands.”

— Vera Brittain

2. “I thought that spring must last forevermore, For I was young and loved, and it was May.”

— Vera Brittain

3. “All that a pacifist can undertake – but it is a very great deal – is to refuse to kill, injure or otherwise cause suffering to another human creature, and untiringly to order his life by the rule of love though others may be captured by hate.”

— Vera Brittain

4. “It is probably true to say that the largest scope for change still lies in men’s attitude to women, and in women’s attitude to themselves.”

— Vera Brittain

5. “Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.”

— Vera Brittain

6. “He was, I told myself, a unique experience in my existence; I never think definitely of him as man or boy, as older or younger, taller or shorter than I am, but always of him as a mind in tune with mine, in which many of the notes are quite different from mine but are all in the same key.”

— Vera Brittain

7. “There is an abiding beauty which may be appreciated by those who will see things as they are and who will ask for no reward except to see.”

— Vera Brittain

8. “The best prose is written by authors who see their universe with a poet’s eyes.”

— Vera Brittain

9. “I found it not inappropriate that the years of frustration and grief and loss, of work and conflict and painful resurrection, should have led me through their dark and devious ways to this new beginning.”

— Vera Brittain

10. “The pacifist’s task today is to find a method of helping and healing which provides a revolutionary constructive substitute for war.”

— Vera Brittain

11. “College is a secluded life of scholastic vegetation.”

— Vera Brittain

12. “There is a strange lack of dignity in conquest; the dull, uncomplaining endurance of defeat appears more worthy of congratulation.”

— Vera Brittain

13. “How fortunate we were who still had hope I did not then realise; I could not know how soon the time would come when we should have no more hope, and yet be unable to die.”

— Vera Brittain

14. “For me, as for all the world, the War was a tragedy and a vast stupidity, a waste of youth and of time; it betrayed my faith, mocked my love, and irremediably spoilt my career.”

— Vera Brittain

15. “I know one husband and wife who, whatever the official reasons given to the court for the break up of their marriage, were really divorced because the husband believed that nobody ought to read while he was talking and the wife that nobody ought to talk while she was reading.”

— Vera Brittain

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16. “I know of no place where the wind can be as icy and the damp so penetrating as in Oxford round about Easter time.”

— Vera Brittain

17. “Most men, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process; it brings to the individual far more suffering than happiness in a semi-civilised world which still goes to war.”

— Vera Brittain

18. “There is still, I think, not enough recognition by teachers of the fact that the desire to think – which is fundamentally a moral problem – must be induced before the power is developed. Most people, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process; it brings to the individual far more suffering than happiness in a semi-civilised world which still.”

— Vera Brittain

19. “Few of humanity’s characteristics are more disconcerting than its ability to reduce world-events to its own level, wherever this may happen to be.”

— Vera Brittain

20. “We should never be at the mercy of Providence if only we understood that we ourselves are Providence.”

— Vera Brittain

21. “It seems delightfully incongruous,’ he wrote from Armentie‘res, ’that there should be good shops and fine buildings and comfortable beds less than half an hour’s walk from the trenches.”

— Vera Brittain

22. “Only, I felt, by some such attempt to write history in terms of personal life could I rescue something that might be of value, some element of truth and hope and usefulness, from the smashing up of my own youth by the war.”

— Vera Brittain

23. “And as I went up to him and took his hands, I felt that I had made no mistakes; and although I knew that, in a sense which could never be true of him, I was linked with the past that I had yielded up, inextricably and for ever, I found it not inappropriate that the years of frustration and grief and loss, of work and conflict and painful resurrection, should have led me through their dark and devious ways to this new beginning.”

— Vera Brittain

24. “People talked so foolishly, I thought, about the ennobling effects of suffering. No doubt the philosophy that tells you your soul grows through grief and sorrow is right – ultimately. But I don’t think this is the case at first. At first, pain beyond a certain point merely makes you lifeless, and apathetic to everything but itself.”

— Vera Brittain

25. “The joys of motherhood are not excessively apparent during the first few weeks of a baby’s life.”

— Vera Brittain

26. “Venice is all sea and sculpture...”

— Vera Brittain

27. “I can think of few important movements for reform in which success was won by any method other than that of an energetic minority presenting the indifferent majority with a fait accompli, which was then accepted.”

— Vera Brittain

28. “At sixteen, he was inclined to be rather priggish and self-righteous. Not such bad qualities in adolescence after all, since most of us have to be self-righteous before we can be righteous.”

— Vera Brittain

29. “Love, for her, was something to be gloried in and acknowledged; like so many others, she had not seen enough of the War at first hand to realise how quickly romance was being replaced by bitterness and pessimism in all the young lovers whom 1914 had caught at the end of their teens.”

— Vera Brittain

30. “So many people seem to imagine that because the actual tools of writing are easily accessible, it is less difficult than the other arts. This is entirely an illusion.”

— Vera Brittain

31. “Why, I wonder, do people who at one time or another have all been young themselves, and who ought therefore to know better, generalize so suavely and so mendaciously about the golden hours of youth-that period of life when every sorrow seems permanent, and every setback insuperable?”

— Vera Brittain

32. “The fact that, within ten years, I lost one world, and after a time rose again, as it were, from spiritual death to find another, seems to me one of the strongest arguments against suicide that life can provide. There may not be – I believe that there is not – resurrection after death, but nothing could prove more conclusively than my own brief but eventful history the fact that resurrection is possible within our limited span of earthly time.”

— Vera Brittain

33. “I joined the Pass Mods. class and studied the cyropaedia and Livy’s Wars with a resentful feeling that there was quite enough war in the world without having to read about it in Latin.”

— Vera Brittain

34. “To have some real work to do after more than a year of purposeless pottering was like a bracing visit to a cliff-bound coast after lethargic existence on a marshy lowland.”

— Vera Brittain

35. “An author who waits for the right ‘mood’ will soon find that ‘moods’ get fewer and fewer until they cease altogether.”

— Vera Brittain

36. “When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans.”

— Vera Brittain

37. “I am less blindly confident than I once was, for I have been learning a truer estimate of myself, my failings and limitations, in these dark days. I have learnt to hope that if there be a Judgment Day of some kind, God will not see us with our own eyes, nor judge us as we judge ourselves.”

— Vera Brittain

38. “You know you wouldn’t be happy unless you married an odd sort of person.”

— Vera Brittain

39. “Babies are a nuisance, of course. But so does everything seem to be that is worthwhile – husbands and books and committees and being loved and everything. We have to choose between ease and rich unrest.”

— Vera Brittain

40. “However deep our devotion may be to parents or to children, it is our contemporaries alone with whom understanding is instinctive and entire.”

— Vera Brittain

41. “The tragedy of journalism lies in its impermanence; the very topicality which gives it brilliance condemns it to an early death. Too often it is a process of flinging bright balloons in the path of the hurricane, a casting of priceless petals upon the rushing surface of a stream.”

— Vera Brittain

42. “If the would-be writer studies people in their everyday lives and discovers how to make his characters in their quieter moods interesting to his readers, he will have learned far more than he can ever learn from the constant presentation of crises.”

— Vera Brittain

43. “English lecturers... who treat the Americans as a race of barbarians without any history should be taken for a tour round Washington before they are permitted to speak!”

— Vera Brittain

44. “But this is so no longer, and never will be again, since man’s inventions have eliminated so much distance and time; for better, for worse, we are now each of us part of the surge and swell of great economic and political movements, and whatever we do, as individuals or as nations, deeply affects everyone else.”

— Vera Brittain

45. “A number of neurotic ancestors, combined with with persistent, unresolved terrors of childhood, had deprived me of the comfortable gift of natural courage.”

— Vera Brittain

46. “At this time of the year it seems that everything ought to be creative, not destructive, and that we should encourage things to live and not die.”

— Vera Brittain

47. “I had seen the poor, the meek and the modest, the young, the brave and the idealistic – all those, in fact, who always are too easily enchanted by high-sounding phrases – giving their lives and their futures in order that the powerful might have more power, the rich grow richer, the old remain in comparative security.”

— Vera Brittain

48. “You see, when everything else is gone, there’s always work. I don’t think anyone ever realises how much work can mean until the other things are gone.”

— Vera Brittain

49. “That’s the worst of sorrow,” I decided, with less surprise than I had accepted the same conclusion after Roland’s death. “It’s always a vicious circle. It makes one tense and hard and disagreeable, and this means that one repels and antagonises people, and then they dislike and avoid one – and that means more isolation and still more sorrow.”

— Vera Brittain

50. “But we share a memory which is worth all the rest of the world, and the sun of that memory never sets. And you know that I love you, that I would do anything in the world in my power if you should ask it, and that I am your servant as well as your brother. ‘EDWARD.”

— Vera Brittain