Top 15 Graham Greene Quotes

At the end of what is called the "sexual life" the only love which has lasted is the love which has everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.

Can you hate something you don't believe in? And yet he called himself a free-thinker. What an impossible paradox, to be free and to be so obsessed.

Under my cloak, a fig for the King!

There’s a virtue in slowness, which we have lost

Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt.

It was not the kind of surroundings in which any one with free will — if such a man existed — would have chosen to await death.

Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.

Simplicity belonged by right to those who were native-born, those who could take the conditions of life, however bizarre, for granted.

It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognised plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and almost forgotten.

God...created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed — that is the meaning of evolution.

I had very good dentures once. Some magnificent gold work. It’s the only form of jewelry a man can wear that women fully appreciate.

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.

There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.

Communism, my friend, is more than Marxism, just as Catholicism … is more than the Roman Curia. There is a mystique as well as a politique....Catholics and communists have commited great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate...if you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?

We mustn’t complain too much of being comedians—it’s an honourable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed—that’s all. We are bad comedians, we aren’t bad men.