Top 15 Hannah Arendt Quotes

We are the hero of our own story.

"Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’."
(on Lillian Hellman)

What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?

Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.

I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand.

In violence we forget who we are.

You mustn’t force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex — that’s quite a thought, isn’t it?

We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words you are the hero of your own story.

There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.

What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.

One of the big features of living alone was that you could talk to yourself all you wanted and address imaginary audiences, running the gamut of emotion.

A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.

You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk.

If [she] had come to prefer the company of odd ducks, it was possibly because they had no conception of oddity, or rather, they thought you were odd if you weren't.

She decided she wanted a cool, starchy independent life, with ruffles of humor like window curtains.