Gerald Brenan Quotes

30 quotes in 379 categories

• In a happy marriage it is the wife who provides the climate, the husband the landscape.
• Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned.
• Everyone alters and is altered by everyone else. We are all the time taking in portions of one another or else reacting against them, and…
• Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself.
• We are closer to the ants than to the butterflies. Very few people can endure much leisure.
• You generally hear that what a man doesn't know doesn't hurt him, but in business what a man doesn't know does hurt.
• It is by sitting down to write every morning that he becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.
• Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden death.
• The only test of work of literature is that it shall please other ages than its own.
• When I write a page that reads badly I know that it is myself who has written it. When it reads well it has come…
• Poets and painters are outside the class system, or rather they constitute a special class of their own, like the circus people and the Gypsies.
• Intellectuals are people who believe that ideas are of more importance than values. That is to say, their own ideas and other people's values.
• One road to happiness is to cultivate curiosity about everything. Not only about people but about subjects, not only about the arts but about history…
• Do not believe those persons who say they have never been jealous. What they mean is that they have never been in love.
• Those who have money think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know it is money.
• Wisdom is keeping a sense of fallibility of all our views and opinions.
• The cliché is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in clichés, so that English literature is always in danger of…
• Marriage is an arrangement by which two people start by getting the best out of each other and often end by getting the worst.
• Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals, and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.
• The more we feel sorry for ourselves, the less sorry others will feel for us. People don't waste their small store of sympathy on those…

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