Gerald Brenan Quotations

Marriage is an arrangement by which two people start by getting the best out of each other and often end by getting the worst.

Do not believe those persons who say they have never been jealous. What they mean is that they have never been in love.

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.

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.

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 being poisoned by its own secretions.

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.

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 who can provide it so richly for themselves.

As Coleridge said, "We receive but what we give." The happy life is a life of continual generosity in which we go out to meet and acclaim the world.

We soon cease to feel the grief at the deaths of our friends, yet we continue to the end of our lives to miss them. They are still with us in their absence.