Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust. In a closely beleaguered city every sentry is a potential traitor.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the vastness and complexity of divine love compared to human understanding.
Graham Greene's quote reflects on the nature of God's love and how it is fundamentally different from the diluted, often distorted forms of love that people experience. He suggests that if we were to truly encounter God’s love, we might not even recognize it due to our limited perspectives and the way we often perceive love in our everyday lives. The imagery of a 'smallest glass of love' mixed with 'ditch-water' illustrates how human experience can dilute and distort the purity and strength of divine love, leading us to misunderstanding and fear rather than pure recognition.
Themes
GodLoveHuman PerceptionDivineUnderstanding
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote during a sermon to emphasize the difference between human love and divine 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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.
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