Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust. In a closely beleaguered city every sentry is a potential traitor.
Graham GreeneRead
So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Happiness can provide the strength to endure difficult tasks, while unhappiness leads to a breakdown in discipline.
In this quote, Graham Greene emphasizes the importance of happiness as a driving force behind perseverance and discipline. He suggests that when individuals are happy, they can face and endure challenges and responsibilities with greater ease, but when they are unhappy, it leads to a loss of motivation and commitment to their work or habits.
Themes
HappinessDisciplineWorkMotivationPerseverance
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about resilience and perseverance in the workplace.
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
Happiness is the death of the ego. If you want to remain a separate entity from existence as almost everybody is trying to do, you will be afraid of being blissful, cheerful. You will feel guilty in being blissful. You will feel suicidal because you are committing suicide on the psychological level, on the level of the ego.
RajneeshRead
The great end of all human industry is the attainment of happiness
David HumeRead
Do not forget that even as "to work is to worship" so to be cheery is to worship also, and to be happy is the first step to being pious.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.
Victor HugoRead
Activities that promote mind-wandering, such as reading literature, going for a walk, exercising, or listening to music, are hugely restorative.
Daniel LevitinRead
Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying.
Milan KunderaRead