Gerald Brenan

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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