Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust. In a closely beleaguered city every sentry is a potential traitor.
Graham GreeneRead
I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Belief can be both an intoxicating and consuming force, similar to the experience of falling in love.
This quote by Graham Greene suggests that belief, much like love, can envelop a person and affect them deeply. It can spread uncontrollably, resembling a disease that one cannot escape once it takes hold, underscoring the profound impact that belief can have on an individual's life and emotions.
Themes
BeliefLoveEmotionImpactIntensity
In practice
Example use cases
In a romantic setting, expressing your passion for a partner can include referencing how belief can enhance love.
More from Graham Greene
All quotes →It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn’t the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn’t we have committed our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old deathbed?
Graham GreeneRead
God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love.
Graham GreeneRead
Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.
Graham GreeneRead
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
Graham GreeneRead
Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.
Graham GreeneRead
Similar quotes
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
Tom StoppardRead
How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections? The boy's flute-like voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield a richer, deeper music.
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Just to be in love seemed the most blissful luxury I had ever known. The thought came to me that perhaps it is the loving that counts, not the being loved in return -- that perhaps true loving can never know anything but happiness. For a moment I felt that I had discovered a great truth.
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Yet nothing can to nothing fall, Nor any place be empty quite; Therefore I think my breast hath all Those pieces still, though they be not unite; And now, as broken glasses show A hundred lesser faces, so My rags of heart can like, wish, and adore, But after one such love, can love no more.
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Rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love.
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Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise.
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