“Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.”
More from Graham Greene on Philosophy
“Innocence must die young if it isn't to kill the souls of men”
“Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.”
“No human being can really understand another and no one can arrange another's happiness.”
“Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.”
“No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.”
“It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.”
“Beauty is like success: we can't love it for long.”
“He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied.”
“Suffering is not increased by numbers. One body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.”
“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
Others on Philosophy
Ludwig Wittgenstein
22 quotes“The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.”
Christopher Hitchens
22 quotes“How much vanity must be concealed – not too effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is the personal object of...”
Nietzsche
22 quotes“One does not hate as long as one has a low esteem of someone, but only when one esteems him as an equal or a superior.”
Carl Jung
21 quotes“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”
Immanuel Kant
20 quotes“Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.”
Heraclitus
19 quotes“All things flow nothing abides.”
H. L. Mencken
17 quotes“We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”
C.S. Lewis
15 quotes“[Consciousness] is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
14 quotes“Consciousness is man's greatest misfortune, still I know that man loves it and will not exchange it for any satisfaction...”
Samuel Beckett
14 quotes“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.”
Napoleon
14 quotes“Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.”
Isaac Asimov
13 quotes“Society is much more easily soothed than one's own conscience.”