Rebecca West Quotes

Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself.

I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.

No great thing happens suddenly.

What is art? It is not decoration. It is the re-living of experience.

the law, like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience.

Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized upon by a madness which forced them to commit the very acts which make it certain that what they dread will happen.

There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.

It isn't only living people who die, it is great stretches of living, which can die even when the people who lived there still exist.

She did not suddenly start being disagreeable this afternoon, she was so good at it, she had evidently practised whatever are the scales and arpeggios of rudeness every day of her life.

I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value.

Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts.

There is nothing rarer than a man who can be trusted never to throw away happiness, however eagerly he sometimes grasps it. In history we are as frequently interested in our own doom.

Without doubt cats are intellectuals who have been, by some mysterious decree of Providence, deprived of the comfort of the word.

a good oyster cannot please the palate as acutely as a bad one can revolt it, and a good oyster cannot make him who eats it live for ever though a bad one can make him dead for ever.

A good cause has to be careful of the company it keeps.

The general tendency [is] to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted.

The American struggle for the vote was much more difficult than the English for the simple reason that it was much more easy.

I cannot think that espionage can be recommended as a technique for building an impressive civilization. It's a lout's game.

It is not possible that a just God should forgive people who are wicked because another person who was good endured agony by being nailed to a cross.

It seemed a good idea at the time.

For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition.

Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music.

Nobody ever wrote a good book simply by collecting a number of accurate facts and valid ideas.

All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.

It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.

The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.

Music is part of human life and partakes of the human tragedy. There is much more music in the world than is allowed to change into heard sounds and prove its point.

Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does nore than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read.

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.

To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere.

art is at least in part a way of collecting information about the universe.

The principle of avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of energy has enabled the species to survive in a world full of stimuli; but it prevents the survival of the aristocracy.

Women know the damnation of charity because the habit of civilization has always been to throw them cheap alms rather than give them good wages.

The adventure is over. Everything gets over, and nothing is ever enough. Except the part you carry with you.

Unfortunately, all gatherings convened for the betterment of the human lot show a tendency to gas themselves, and not with laughing-gas either.

The redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it.

If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell.

She saw she had fallen into the hands of one of those doctors who have strayed too far from apparent in the direction of the soul.

There is a point, and it is reached more easily than is supposed, where interference with freedom of the arts and literature becomes an attack on the life of society.

The earth itself is slightly resistant to routine.

I always have beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters.

It would be no loss to the world if most of the writers now writing had been strangled at birth.

I don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.

I really write to find out what I know about something and what is to be known about something.

Christianity must be regarded not as a final revelation but as a phase of revelation.

Why must you always try to be omnipotent, and shove things about? Tragic things happen sometimes that we just have to submit to.

... to lovers innumerable things do not matter.

His smile bore the same relation to a real smile as false teeth do to real teeth.

Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.

If I do not do sensible things about investments I shall spend my old age in a workhouse, where nobody will understand my jokes.