33+ Vera Brittain Quotes On Education, Religion And Youth

Vera Brittain was an English writer, pacifist and feminist. She is best known for her 1933 autobiography Testament of Youth, which chronicles her life during World War I and the aftermath of the war. Her other works include poetry, novels, and nonfiction, including her 1937 book Testament of Friendship, which details her relationship with Winifred Holtby. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Vera Brittain on love, education, religion.

Top 10 Vera Brittain Quotes

1. The pacifist's task today is to find a method of helping and healing which provides a revolutionary constructive substitute for war.
2. Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.
3. Modern war and modern civilisation are utterly incompatible...one or the other must go.
4. There is an abiding beauty which may be appreciated by those who will see things as they are and who will ask for no reward except to see.
5. We should never be at the mercy of Providence if only we understood that we ourselves are Providence.
6. most of us have to be self-righteous before we can be righteous.
7. I know of no place where the wind can be as icy and the damp so penetrating as in Oxford round about Easter time.
8. The idea that it is necessary to go to a university in order to become a successful writer . . . is one of those fantasies that surround authorship.
9. Meek wifehood is no part of my profession; I am your friend, but never your possession.
10. Few of humanity's characteristics are more disconcerting than its ability to reduce world-events to its own level, wherever this may happen to be.

Vera Brittain Short Quotes

• Venice is all sea and sculpture.
• few things are more rewarding than a child's open uncalculating devotion.
• It never seems to occur to anybody that some women may not want to find husbands.
• The best prose is written by authors who see their universe with a poet’s eyes.

Vera Brittain Quotes About Love

All that a pacifist can undertake -- but it is a very great deal -- is to refuse to kill, injure or otherwise cause suffering to another human creature, and untiringly to order his life by the rule of love though others may be captured by hate. — Vera Brittain

Babies are a nuisance, of course. But so does everything seem to be that is worth while – husbands and books and committees and being loved and everything. We have to choose between barren ease and rich unrest – or rather, one does not choose. — Vera Brittain

I thought that spring must last forevermore, For I was young and loved, and it was May. — Vera Brittain

Vera Brittain Quotes About Life

Why, I wonder, do people who at one time or another have all been young themselves, and who ought therefore to know better, generalize so suavely and so mendaciously about the golden hours of youth-that period of life when every sorrow seems permanent, and every setback insuperable? — Vera Brittain

College is a secluded life of scholastic vegetation — Vera Brittain

The joys of motherhood are not excessively apparent during the first few weeks of a baby's life. — Vera Brittain

If the would-be writer studies people in their everyday lives and discovers how to make his characters in their quieter moods interesting to his readers, he will have learned far more than he can ever learn from the constant presentation of crises. — Vera Brittain

Vera Brittain Famous Quotes And Sayings

I know one husband and wife who, whatever the official reasons given to the court for the break up of their marriage, were really divorced because the husband believed that nobody ought to read while he was talking and the wife that nobody ought to talk while she was reading. — Vera Brittain

The tragedy of journalism lies in its impermanence; the very topicality which gives it brilliance condemns it to an early death. Too often it is a process of flinging bright balloons in the path of the hurricane, a casting of priceless petals upon the rushing surface of a stream. — Vera Brittain

Most men, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process; it brings to the individual far more suffering than happiness in a semi-civilised world which still goes to war. — Vera Brittain

I can think of few important movements for reform in which success was won by any method other than that of an energetic minority presenting the indifferent majority with a fait accompli, which was then accepted. — Vera Brittain

Definite gifts render their possessors capable of overcoming any obstacle this side of death; they create an impetus of far more genuine value than external advantages in some other career where the impulse to make use of them remains weak or non-existent. The work that one enjoys is the greatest source of happiness and vitality in life. — Vera Brittain

At no previous period has mankind been faced by a half-century which so paradoxically united violence and progress. Its greater and lesser wars and long series of major assassinations have been strangely combined with the liberation of more societies and individuals than ever before in history, and by the transformation of millions of second-class citizens -- women, workers and the members of subject races -- to a stage at which first-rate achievement is no longer inhibited even if opportunities are not yet complete. — Vera Brittain

However deep our devotion may be to parents or to children, it is our contemporaries alone with whom understanding is instinctive and entire. — Vera Brittain

I don't think victory over death... is anything so superficial as a person fulfilling their normal span of life. It can be twofold; a victory over death by the man who faces it for himself without fear, and a victory by those who, loving him, know that death is but a little thing compared with the fact that he lived and was the kind of person he was. — Vera Brittain

So many people seem to imagine that because the actual tools of writing are easily accessible, it is less difficult than the other arts. This is entirely an illusion. — Vera Brittain

It is probably true to say that the largest scope for change still lies in men's attitude to women, and in women's attitude to themselves. — Vera Brittain

belated maternity has had its compensations; small children have a habit of conferring persistent youth upon their parents, and by their eager vitality postpone the unenterprising cautions and timidities of middle age. — Vera Brittain

An author who waits for the right 'mood' will soon find that 'moods' get fewer and fewer until they cease altogether. — Vera Brittain

Life Lessons by Vera Brittain

1. Vera Brittain's life teaches us to never give up in the face of adversity, to remain resilient and determined in the pursuit of our dreams.
2. Her work also teaches us the importance of standing up for what we believe in, even if it means standing alone.
3. Finally, her life reminds us to never lose sight of our values and to always strive to make a positive difference in the world.