Gerald Brenan Quotes

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

  Gerald Brenan

  Boredom, Bores, Oneself

  48 Copy quote

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

  Gerald Brenan

  Business, Thinking, Words Of Wisdom

  21 Copy quote

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

  Gerald Brenan

  Wisdom, Views, Opinion

  16 Copy quote

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

  Gerald Brenan

  Butterfly, People, Relaxation

  15 Copy quote

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

  Gerald Brenan

  Anniversary, Wedding, Husband

  15 Copy quote

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

  Gerald Brenan

  Giving, Age, Aging

  11 Copy quote

• One road to happiness is to cultivate curiosity about everything. Not only about people but about subjects, not only about the arts but about history and foreign customs. Not only about countries and cities, but about plants and animals. Not only about lichened rocks and curious markings on the bark of trees, but about stars and atoms. Not only about your friends but about that strange labyrinth we inhabit which we call ourselves. Then, if we do that, we will never suffer a moment's boredom.

  Gerald Brenan

  Happiness, Happy, Country

  11 Copy quote

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

  Gerald Brenan

  Quality, Bad Qualities, Ridiculous

  12 Copy quote

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

  Gerald Brenan

  Broken Heart, Two, People

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Gerald Brenan

  Happy Life, Generosity, Giving

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Gerald Brenan

  Sympathy, Sorry, People

  4 Copy quote

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

  Gerald Brenan

  Death, War, Age

  53 Copy quote

• The only test of work of literature is that it shall please other ages than its own.

  Gerald Brenan

  Writing, Age, Literature

  10 Copy quote

• A bad memory is the mother of invention.

  Gerald Brenan

  Mother, Memories, Invention

  5 Copy quote

• 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 our natures.

  Gerald Brenan

  Time, Acquisition, Imitation

  4 Copy quote

• It is by sitting down to write every morning that he becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.

  Gerald Brenan

  Morning, Attitude, Writing

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Gerald Brenan

  Believe, Ideas, People

  7 Copy quote

• We should all live as if we were never going to die, for it is the deaths of our friends that hurt us, not our own.

  Gerald Brenan

  Death, Hurt, Should

  4 Copy quote

• Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals, and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.

  Gerald Brenan

  Animal, Circus, Cracks

  10 Copy quote

• 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.

  Gerald Brenan

  Race, Poetry, Literature

  4 Copy quote

• When I write a page that reads badly I know that it is myself who has written it. When it reads well it has come through from somewhere else.

  Gerald Brenan

  Writing, Somewhere Else, Pages

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Gerald Brenan

  Hurt, Business, Knowledge

  5 Copy quote

• The cliche is dead poetry.

  Gerald Brenan

  Cliche

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Gerald Brenan

  Class, People, Special

  4 Copy quote

• Every writer and artist wonders what in the world people of other professions can find to live for.

  Gerald Brenan

  Artist, People, World

  4 Copy quote

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