top of page
"I didn't doubt for a moment that she had read them all, or that they were the right books to own. Further, they seemed to be an organic combination of her mind and personality, whereas mine struck me as functionally separate, straining to describe a character I hoped to grow into."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Growth quotes

"I hope that in this year to come, YOU make mistakes. Because if YOU are making mistakes, then YOU are making NEW things, trying NEW things, learning, living, pushing YOURself, changing YOURself, changing YOUR world. YOU're doing things YOU've never done before, n MORE importantly, YOU're doing something."

"Every morning, introduce one positive thought into your mind. Be persistent with it until it becomes your habit. It will change your life."

"Appreciate every little improvement. Forget to criticize every failure as long as you are learning from them."

"Accept losing but never give up the hope of winning"

"Adversity could be an advantage in the future. To be a success, take the advantage of adversity whenever possible."

"If you see only problems, then the doors of opportunities will close. If you see only opportunities, then problems will fly away."
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes

"What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths."

"Flaubert didn't just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together."

"Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance."

"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."

"His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he failed in the correct and acceptable fashion."

"If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details."

"You can't love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can't be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you can get away with it, but that's not what I mean). Show me the tyrants who have been great lovers."

"When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up."

"We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--- it's not useful--- to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it."
bottom of page