Quotes from Gerald Brenan

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.

The Spanish economic system is like a game of musical chairs, in which there are only half as many seats as there are performers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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