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"Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered."
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"Two things influence one's wisdom: remarkable experience and " evenmuch more " accumulated knowledge."

"Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table-it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket-that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep."

"Simple minded people do things like gossip, lie, spread rumors, and cause troubles. But, I know you're more intelligent."

"There is no saint here. I have attained wisdom from life's experiences... the positive, the negative, the destructive, the nourishing. I have been medicine and I have been poison. I've learned a lot about heaven from aligning with angels and I learned a lot about hell from acting like a devil. I offer my scars... what you call "wisdom"... as insight I have gathered from my comfort of living within both the light and the shadow."
Explore more quotes by Graham Greene

"People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery."

"In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles."

"The conditions of writing change absolutely between the first novel and the second: the first is an adventure, the second is a duty. The first is like a sprint which leaves you exhausted and triumphant beside the track. With the second the writer has been transformed into a long-distance runner - the finishing tape is out of sight, at the end of life. He must guard his energies and plan ahead. A long endurance is more exhausting than a sprint, and less heroic."

"I know one thing you don't. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn't teach you that at school.'Rose didn't answer the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods--Good and Evil."

"Hatred seems to operate on the same glands as love it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?"

"Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever."

"Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing."

"The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves. Early reading has more influence than any religious teaching."
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