top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say that you love humanity? Are you sure you aren't treating yourself to easy self-congratulation, seeking approval, making certain you're on the right side?"
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Humanity quotes
"I had rather that the human race, having a certain quality in their lives, should continue for only a few centuries than that, losing freedom, friendship, dignity, and mercy, and learning to be quite content without them, they should continue for millions of millennia."
"And just look at these men: their eye saith it - they know nothing better on earth than to be with a woman.Filth is at the bottom of their souls, and alas! If their filth hath spirit in it!"
"Show that you care and share with those who are in need."
"Humility is one of the best expressions of self respect."
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes
"Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior."
"Throw off your grief,' doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away."
"He feared me as many men fear women: because their mistresses (or their wives) understand them. They are scarcely adult, some men: they wish women to understand them, and to that end they tell them all their secrets; and then, when they are properly understood, they hate their women for understanding them."
"If the writer were more like a reader, he'd be a reader, not a writer. It's as uncomplicated as that."
"If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul."
"I don't ever want to get old. Spare me that. Have you the power? No, even you don't have the power, alas."
"The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?"
"The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur."
"(on grief) And you do come out of it, that's true. After a year, after five. But you don't come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life."
bottom of page