George Orwell Quotes


101 quotes:

"Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened."
Author: Orwell Quotes Category: Writers And Writing Quotes
"He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer."
Author: Orwell Quotes Category: Writers And Writing Quotes
"For a creative writer possession of the ''truth'' is less important than emotional sincerity."
Author: Orwell Quotes Category: Sincerity Quotes
"The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life."
Author: Orwell Quotes Category: Youth Quotes Reason Quotes
"They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening"
Author: Orwell Quotes Category: Reality Quotes
"Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other."
Author: Orwell Quotes Category: Potential Quotes Revolutions And Revolutionaries Quotes
"The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection … that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals."
Author: Orwell Quotes Category: Perfection Quotes
"The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals."
Author: Orwell Quotes Category: Perfection Quotes
"The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection."
Author: Orwell Quotes Category: Perfection Quotes
"The existence of good bad literature --the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously --is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration."
Author: Orwell Quotes Category: Literature Quotes
"All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."
Author: Orwell Quotes Category: Lies And Lying Quotes Writers And Writing Quotes
"To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up."
Author: Orwell Quotes Category: Language Quotes
"It is hard to imagine how the U.N., perhaps the world's most important international organization and one which is widely counted on to preserve the truth, could allow itself to blatantly deviate from history and misinform the world about something so fundamental to its history."
Author: Orwell Quotes Category: Hard Quotes
"Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness"
Author: Orwell Quotes Category: Happiness Quotes
"The existence of good bad literature /the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously /is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration."
Author: Orwell Quotes Category: Existence Quotes
"The high sentiments always win in the end, the leaders who offer blood, toil, tears, and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic."
Author: Orwell Quotes Category: Emotions Quotes Leaders And Leadership Quotes
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men"
Author: Orwell Quotes Category: Duty Quotes
"To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle."
Author: Orwell Quotes Category: Common Sense Quotes
"Throughout recorded time... there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other. The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable."
Author: Orwell Quotes Category: Class Quotes
"To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay."
Author: Orwell Quotes Category: Civilization Quotes

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