Muriel Spark quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Muriel Spark on Wise Famous Quotes.

Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life.

It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree but smiles.

Saving and pinching to get married, you're losing the best time of your life.

Ridicule is the only honorable weapon we have left.

I'm old-fashioned beyond my years.

We have invented sex guilt to take our minds off the real thing.

Never apologise, never explain.

If you're going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly. If you're going to be a Christian, you may as well be a Catholic.

Let us run up debts. One is nobody without debts.

Contradictions in human character are one of its most consistent notes ...

It is difficult for people of advanced years to start remembering they must die. It is best to form the habit while young.

These years are still the years of my prime. It is important to recognise the years of one's prime, always remember that.

For those who like that sort of thing," said Miss Brodie in her best Edinburgh voice, "That is the sort of thing they like.

Hildegard had long felt that sentimentality was a luxury she could not afford.

I often wonder if we were all characters in one of God's dreams.

It is impossible to repent of love. The sin of love does not exist.

You don't know what it's like trying to eat enough to live on and at the same time avoid fats and carbohydrates.

I am putting old heads on your young shoulders,' Miss Brodie had told them at the time.

I am a hoarder of two things: documents and trusted friends.

I was just as anxious to prevent injustice as to cause justice.

Fiction to me is a kind of parable. You have got to make up your mind it's not true. Some kind of truth emerges from it, but it's not fact.

Final perseverance is the doctrine that wins the eternal victory in small things as in great

Be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur.

Goodness, Truth and Beauty come first

Neurotics are awfully quick to notice other people's mentalities ...

Flattening their scorn underneath the chariot wheels of her superiority.

Jealousy ... is an affliction of the spirit which, unlike some sins of the flesh, gives no one any pleasure.

A work of art is like living people.

Phrases like 'the team spirit' are always employed to cut across individualism, love and personal loyalties.

Interviews can be stimulating. It depends on the intelligence of the interviewer.

Remember you must die.

[...] there were other people's Edinburghs quite different from hers [...]

It is well, when in difficulties, to say never a word, neither black nor white. Speech is silver but silence is golden.

4:15. Not 4 not 4:30 but 4:15. She thought to intimidate me with the use of quarter hours.

How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century,

So great was the noise during the day that I used to lie awake at night listening to silence.

One should only see a psychiatrist out of boredom.

Sandwiches,' she said, 'like diamonds, are forever.

Nothing can be more puritanical in application than the virtues.

I used to think it a pity that her mother rather than she had not thought of birth control.

Allow me, in conclusion, to congratulate you warmly upon your sexual intercourse, as well as your singing.

Beware of men bearing flowers.

From my experience of life I believe my personal motto should be: 'Beware of any man bringing flowers.

Looking forward to going home, I was necessarily looking backward.

It is a good thing to go to Paris for a few days if you have had a lot of trouble, and that is my advice to everyone except Parisians.

To put it squarely, as I say in my memoir, the eternal triangle has come full circle.

How do you know when you're in love?' she said.
'The traffic improves and the cost of living seems very low.

If you choose the sort of life which has no conventional pattern you have to try to make an art of it, or it is a mess.

I never trust the airlines from those countries where the pilots believe in the afterlife. You are safer when they don't.

Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and dying as on a battlefield.

Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.

But you won't be able to pin her down on sex. Have you thought of politics?

Beware the ire of the calm.

She did not know then that the price of allowing false opinions was the gradual loss of one's capacity for forming true ones.

A rebellion against a tyrant is only immoral when it hasn't got a chance.

To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul.

The sacrifice of pleasures is of course itself a pleasure.

She wasn't a person to whom things happen. She did all the happenings.

Frankness is usually a euphemism for rudeness.

I wouldn't take the Pope too seriously. He's a Pole first, a pope second, and maybe a Christian third.

Sooner or later I do what I want to do.

Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.

The one certain way for a woman to hold a man is to leave him for religion.

It never really occurred to her that literary men, if they like women at all, do not want literary women but girls.

Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that's their order of importance.

At that time many of the men looked like Rupert Brooke, whose portrait still hung in everyone's imagination.

I have a great desire to make people smile - not laugh. Laughter is too aggressive. People bare their teeth.

I see no reason to keep silent about my enjoyment of the sound of my own voice as I work.

You look for one thing and you find another.