110+ Rebecca West Quotes On Education, Fashion And Feminism

Rebecca West (1892-1983) was an Irish author and journalist. She wrote about a range of topics, from feminism to politics, and is best known for her novel, The Return of the Soldier. Her work is noted for its vivid prose and exploration of moral and philosophical issues. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Rebecca West on education, love, life.

Top 10 Rebecca West Quotes

1. God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
2. Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.
3. I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
4. The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.
5. There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
6. All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.
7. The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.
8. The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.
9. I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
10. He is every other inch a gentleman.

Rebecca West Short Quotes

• Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
• Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.
• It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.
• Existence in itself, taken at its least miraculous, is a miracle.
• Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.
• I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.
• Art is not a luxury, but a necessity.
• Idiocy is the female defect ... It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy.
• Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.
• There is in every one of us an unending see-saw between the will to live and the will to die.

Rebecca West Quotes About Love

Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs. — Rebecca West

If there is to be any romance in marriage woman must be given every chance to earn a decent living at other occupations. Otherwise no man can be sure that he is loved for himself alone, and that his wife did not come to the Registry Office because she had no luck at the Labour Exchange. — Rebecca West

Where there is real love one wants to go to church first. — Rebecca West

every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris. — Rebecca West

All gambling is the telling of a fortune, but of a monstrously depleted fortune, empty of everything save one numerical circumstance, shorn of all such richness as a voyage across the water, a fair man that loves you, a dark woman that means you harm. — Rebecca West

Man is a hating rather than a loving animal. — Rebecca West

There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped. — Rebecca West

Rebecca West Quotes About Life

Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul. — Rebecca West

Marriage had certain commercial advantages. By it the man secures the exclusive right to the woman's body and by it, the woman binds the man to support her during the rest of her life.... A more disgraceful bargain was never struck. — Rebecca West

A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere. — Rebecca West

All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life. — Rebecca West

If ever peace is to be imposed on the world it will only be because a large number of men who could have taken part in the drill display by the Guards or Marines or at the Royal Tournament turn that strength and precision to the service of life. — Rebecca West

She did not suddenly start being disagreeable this afternoon, she was so good at it, she had evidently practised whatever are the scales and arpeggios of rudeness every day of her life. — Rebecca West

Sex, which ought to be an incident of life, is the obsession of the well-fed world. — Rebecca West

I see the main problem of my life, and indeed anybody's life, as the balancing of competitive freedoms ... a sense of mutual obligations that have to be honored, and a legal system which can be trusted to step in when that sense fails. — Rebecca West

Music is part of human life and partakes of the human tragedy. There is much more music in the world than is allowed to change into heard sounds and prove its point. — Rebecca West

Mozart eliminates the idea of haste from life. His airs could not lag as they make their journey through the listener's attention; they are not the right shape for loitering. But it is as true that they never rush, they are never headlong or helter-skelter, they splash no mud, they raise no dust. — Rebecca West

Rebecca West Quotes About People

Whatever happens, never forget that people would rather be led to perdition by a man, than to victory by a woman. — Rebecca West

Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves. — Rebecca West

There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time. — Rebecca West

Unhappy people are dangerous. — Rebecca West

People call me feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute. — Rebecca West

I believe if people are looking for the truth, the truth of the Christian religion will come out and meet them. — Rebecca West

There is nothing more frightening than the faces of people whom one does not know but who seem to know one, and be amused by one. — Rebecca West

To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere. — Rebecca West

I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute. — Rebecca West

Destiny is another name for humanity's half-hearted yet persistent search for death. Again and again peoples have had the chance to live and show what would happen if human life were irrigated by continual happiness; and they have preferred to blow up the canals and perish of drought. — Rebecca West

Rebecca West Quotes About Express

People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute. — Rebecca West

The French use cooking as a means of self-expression, and this meal perfectly represented the personality of a cook who had spent the morning resting her unwashed chin on the edge of a tureen, pondering whether she should end her life immediately by plunging her head into her abominable soup. — Rebecca West

Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself. — Rebecca West

Rebecca West Famous Quotes And Sayings

Behind it was that vast suspension bridge which always troubles me because it reminds me that in this mechanized age I am as little able to understand my environment as any primitive woman who thinks that a waterfall is inhabited by a spirit, and indeed less so, for her opinion might from a poetical point of view be correct. — Rebecca West

Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility. — Rebecca West

The mind is its own enemy, that fights itself with the innumerable pliant and ineluctable arms of the octopus. — Rebecca West

[On Jane Austen:] To believe her limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond. — Rebecca West

Motherhood is neither a duty nor a privilege, but simply the way that humanity can satisfy the desire for physical immortality and triumph over the fear of death. — Rebecca West

Once a secret society establishes itself within an open society, there is no end to the hideous mistrust it must cause. — Rebecca West

Time spent in a casino is time given to death, a foretaste of the hour when one's flesh will be diverted to the purposes of the worm and not of the will. — Rebecca West

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy. — Rebecca West

If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.' — Rebecca West

In England and America, a beard usually means that its owner would rather be considered venerable than virile; on the continent of Europe, it often means that its owner makes a special claim to virility. — Rebecca West

Now different races and nationalities cherish different ideals of society that stink in each other's nostrils with an offensiveness beyond the power of any but the most monstrous private deed. — Rebecca West

I have no faith in the sense of comforting beliefs which persuade me that all my troubles are blessings in disguise. — Rebecca West

It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster. — Rebecca West

the reward for total abstinence from alcohol seems, illogically enough, to be the capacity for becoming intoxicated without it. — Rebecca West

It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk. — Rebecca West

Domesticity is essentially drama, for drama is conflict, and the home compels conflict by its concentration of active personalities in a small area. The real objection to domesticity is that it is too exciting. — Rebecca West

Journalism: an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space. — Rebecca West

Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology. — Rebecca West

The choice between law and justice is an easy one for courageous minds. — Rebecca West

But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example. — Rebecca West

Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is. — Rebecca West

A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample. — Rebecca West

... when the Spaniards persecuted heretics they may have been crude, but they were not being unreasonable or unpractical. They were at least wiser than the people of to-day who pretend that it does not matter what a man believes, as who should say that the flavour and digestibility of a pudding will have nothing to do with its ingredients. — Rebecca West

International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge. — Rebecca West

I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value. — Rebecca West

a good oyster cannot please the palate as acutely as a bad one can revolt it, and a good oyster cannot make him who eats it live for ever though a bad one can make him dead for ever. — Rebecca West

What is art? It is not decoration. It is the re-living of experience. — Rebecca West

I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood. — Rebecca West

There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are interesting monologues, that is all. — Rebecca West

Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts. — Rebecca West

The American struggle for the vote was much more difficult than the English for the simple reason that it was much more easy. — Rebecca West

Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized upon by a madness which forced them to commit the very acts which make it certain that what they dread will happen. — Rebecca West

Margaret Thatcher has one great advantage - she is a daughter of the people and looks trim, as the daughter of the people desire to be. Shirley Williams has such an advantage over her because she's a member of the upper-middle class and can achieve the kitchen-sink revolutionary look that one cannot get unless one has been to a really good school. — Rebecca West

A good cause has to be careful of the company it keeps. — Rebecca West

But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment; it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life. — Rebecca West

I cannot think that espionage can be recommended as a technique for building an impressive civilization. It's a lout's game. — Rebecca West

The aged are terrible - mere heaps of cinders on the grass from which none can tell how tall the flames once were or what company gathered round them. — Rebecca West

The main difference between men and woman is that men are lunatics and woman are idiots. — Rebecca West

art is at least in part a way of collecting information about the universe. — Rebecca West

... it matters not what natural endowment a race may have if it prostitutes itself to the service of death. — Rebecca West

My memory is certainly in my hands. I can remember things only if I have a pencil and I can write with it and I can play with it. ... I think your hand concentrates for you. I don't know why it should be so. — Rebecca West

Of Virginia Woolf: The talent of this generation which is most certain of survival. — Rebecca West

It is not possible that a just God should forgive people who are wicked because another person who was good endured agony by being nailed to a cross. — Rebecca West

An audience proves its discipline by its capacity for stillness. Those who have never practiced continuous application to an exacting process cannot settle down to simple watching; they must chew gum, they must dig the peel off their oranges, they must shift from foot to foot, from buttock to buttock. — Rebecca West

There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists. — Rebecca West

music is a missionary effort to colonize earth for imperialistic heaven. — Rebecca West

The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly. — Rebecca West

Bad art is maintained by the neurotic, who is deadly afraid of authentic art because it inspires him to go on living, and he is terrified of life. — Rebecca West

There is nothing rarer than a man who can be trusted never to throw away happiness, however eagerly he sometimes grasps it. In history we are as frequently interested in our own doom. — Rebecca West

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind. — Rebecca West

The principle of avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of energy has enabled the species to survive in a world full of stimuli; but it prevents the survival of the aristocracy. — Rebecca West

Nobody ever wrote a good book simply by collecting a number of accurate facts and valid ideas. — Rebecca West

There is a point, and it is reached more easily than is supposed, where interference with freedom of the arts and literature becomes an attack on the life of society. — Rebecca West

it is necessary that we should all have a little of the will to die, because otherwise we would find the performance of our biological duty of death too difficult. — Rebecca West

Getting a divorce is nearly always as cheerful and useful an occupation as breaking valuable china. — Rebecca West

It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes. — Rebecca West

Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste. — Rebecca West

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted. — Rebecca West

The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne. — Rebecca West

I really write to find out what I know about something and what is to be known about something. — Rebecca West

Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does nore than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read. — Rebecca West

I always have beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters. — Rebecca West

domestic work is the most elementary form of labor. It is suitable for those with the intelligence of rabbits. All it requires is cleanlines, tidiness and quickness - not moral or intellectual qualities at all, but merely the outward and visible signs of health. — Rebecca West

... it is nearly impossible to understand those who are beyond our sight, who are not explained to us by ties of birth or the contact of the flesh. — Rebecca West

It appears that even the different parts of the same person do not converse among themselves, do not succeed in learning from each other what are their desires and their intentions. — Rebecca West

It seemed a good idea at the time. — Rebecca West

When we choose a god we choose one as much like ourselves as possible, or even more so! — Rebecca West

the bad is more easily perceived than the good. A fresh lobster does not give such pleasure to the consumer as a stale one will give him pain. — Rebecca West

the law, like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience. — Rebecca West

There are acacias, a graceful species amusingly devitalized by sentimentality, this kind drooping its leaves with the grace of a young widow bowed in controllable grief, this one obscuring them with a smooth silver as of placid tears. They please, like the minor French novelists of the eighteenth century, by suggesting a universe in which nothing cuts deep. — Rebecca West

The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived. — Rebecca West

Life Lessons by Rebecca West

1. Rebecca West's writing emphasizes the importance of standing up for what you believe in and never giving up, even in the face of adversity.
2. She encourages readers to take risks and be brave in the pursuit of their goals, and to accept that failure is part of the journey.
3. Her work also emphasizes the importance of kindness, compassion, and understanding, and the power of storytelling to bring people together.