Top 13 Quotes & Sayings by R.K. Narayan

The difference between a simpleton and an intelligent man, according to the man who is convinced that he is of the latter category, is that the former wholeheartedly accepts all things that he sees and hears while the latter never admits anything except after a most searching scrutiny. He imagines his intelligence to be a sieve of closely woven mesh through which nothing but the finest can pass.

We always question the bonafides of the man who tells us unpleasant facts.

A profound unmitigated loneliness is the only truth of life.

We come together only to go apart again. The law of life can't be avoided. The law comes into operation the moment we detach ourselves from our mother's womb. All struggle & misery in life is due to our attempt to arrest this law or get away from it or in allowing ourselves to be hurt by it. The fact must be recognized. A profound unmitigated loneliness is the only truth of life. All else is false. The law of life. No sense in battling against it.

This education has reduced us to a nation of morons; we were strangers to our own culture and camp followers of another culture, feeding on leavings and garbage . . . What about our own roots? . . . I am up against the system, the whole method and approach of a system of education which makes us morons, cultural morons, but efficient clerks for all your business and administration offices.

Friendship was another illusion like love, though it did not reach the same mad heights. People pretended that they were friends, when the fact was they were brought together by force of circumstances.

If someone should ask, "how should an Opposition function?" the best answer would be, "in the manner of a traditional mother-in-law who watches the performance of household work by a daughter-in-law and follows her about with her comments.

Life is about making right things and going on.

You become writer by writing. It is a yoga.

Death and its associates, after the initial shock, produce callousness.

This is my child. I planted it. I saw it grow. I loved it. Don't cut it down.

Society presses upon us all the time. The progress of the last half century is the progress of the frog out of his well.

No one ever accepts criticism so cheerfully. Neither the man who utters it nor the man who invites it really means it.