Gerald Brenan Quotes (21 Quotes)

The cliche is dead poetry.

We confess our bad qualities to others out of fear of appearing naive or ridiculous by not being aware of them.

If you wish to be brothers, let the arms fall from your hands. One cannot love while holding offensive arms.

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.

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.

Wisdom is keeping a sense of fallibility of all our views and opinions.

As I get older I seem to believe less and less and yet to believe what I do believe more and more.

A healthy old fellow, who is not a fool, is the happiest creature living.

Those who have some means think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know that it is money.

The cliche is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in cliches, so that English literature is always in danger of being poisoned by its own secretions.

Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself.

In a happy marriage it is the wife who provides the climate, the husband the landscape.

I am thirty-three - the age of the good Sans-culotte Jesus an age fatal to revolutionists.

Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden death does.

We are closer to the ants than to the butterflies. Very few people can endure much leisure.

Miller is not really a writer but a non-stop talker to whom someone has given a typewriter.

The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly no poem ever attains such carat purity.

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.

Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned.

Everyone alters and is altered by everyone else. We are all the time taking in portions of one another or else reacting against them, and by these involuntary acquisitions and repulsions modifying ourselves.