Top 180 William Golding Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.”

— William Golding

2. “The greatest ideas are the simplest.”

— William Golding

Featured in: Simplicity Quotes, Quotes About Ideas

3. “I began to see what people were capable of doing. Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.”

— William Golding

Featured in: Human Nature Quotes, Evil Quotes

4. “The thing is – fear can’t hurt you any more than a dream.”

— William Golding

5. “What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?”

— William Golding

6. “Whatever you give a woman, she will make greater. If you give her sperm, she’ll give you a baby. If you give her a house, she’ll give you a home. If you give her groceries, she’ll give you a meal. If you give her a smile, she’ll give you her heart. She multiplies and enlarges what is given to her.”

— William Golding

7. “Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.”

— William Golding

8. “Sucks to your ass-mar!”

— William Golding

9. “He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.”

— William Golding

10. “We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.”

— William Golding

11. “At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.”

— William Golding

12. “Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?”

— William Golding

13. “We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?”

— William Golding

14. “The mask was a thing on it’s own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.”

— William Golding

15. “The Navy’s a very gentlemanly business. You fire at the horizon to sink a ship and then you pull people out of the water and say, ‘Frightfully sorry, old chap.’”

— William Golding

16. “I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.”

— William Golding

17. “He lost himself in a maze of thoughts that were rendered vague by his lack of words to express them. Frowning, he tried again.”

— William Golding

18. “There is, they say, no fool like an old fool.”

— William Golding

19. “You’ll get back to where you came from.”

— William Golding

20. “I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.”

— William Golding

21. “Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!”

— William Golding

22. “Worse than madness. Sanity.”

— William Golding

23. “Which is better – to be a pack of painted Indians like you are, or to be sensible like Ralph is? Which is better – to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill? Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?”

— William Golding

24. “Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind’s essential illness.”

— William Golding

25. “How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t put first things first and act proper?”

— William Golding

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

26. “There’s a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.”

— William Golding

27. “People don’t help much.”

— William Golding

28. “It wasn’t until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you’ve got to write your own books and nobody else’s, and then everything followed from there.”

— William Golding

29. “We’re all mad, the whole damned race. We’re wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we’re all mad and in solitary confinement.”

— William Golding

30. “I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller.”

— William Golding

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

31. “I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.”

— William Golding

32. “If faces were different when lit from above or below – what was a face? What was anything?”

— William Golding

33. “They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate.”

— William Golding

34. “Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don’t understand.”

— William Golding

35. “This is our island. It’s a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we’ll have fun.”

— William Golding

Featured in: Fun Quotes

36. “Childhood is a disease – a sickness that you grow out of.”

— William Golding

37. “We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything.”

— William Golding

38. “They were black and iridescent green and without number; and in front of Simon, the Lord of the Flies hung on his stick and grinned. At last Simon gave up and looked back; saw the white teeth and dim eyes, the blood – and his gaze was held by that ancient, inescapable recognition. In Simon’s right temple, a pulse began to beat on the brain.”

— William Golding

39. “The rules!” shouted Ralph. “You’re breaking the rules!” “Who cares?” Ralph summoned his wits. “Because the rules are the only thing we’ve got!”

— William Golding

40. “The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.”

— William Golding

41. “They were black and iridescent green and without number; and in front of Simon, the Lord of the Flies hung on his stick and grinned.”

— William Golding

42. “The greatest pleasure is not – say – sex or geometry. It is just understanding. And if you can get people to understand their own humanity – well, that’s the job of the writer.”

— William Golding

43. “Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.”

— William Golding

44. “Heaven lies around us in our infancy.”

— William Golding

45. “Life should serve up its feast of experience in a series of courses.”

— William Golding

46. “Are we savages or what?”

— William Golding

47. “I only wanted to keep up a fire!”

— William Golding

48. “You wouldn’t care if I was dead. Nobody’d care. That’s all you want, just my damned body, not me. Nobody wants me, just my damned body. And I’m damned and you’re damned with your cock and your cleverness and your chemistry-.”

— William Golding

49. “Serve you right if something did get you, you useless lot of cry-babies!”

— William Golding

50. “My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.”

— William Golding

Featured in: Hiking Quotes