Top 382 Quotes & Sayings by William Faulkner

History is not was, it is.

I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail...because he has a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.

Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

Our most treasured family heirloom are our sweet family memories. The past is never dead, it is not even past.

Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time.

At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that the young man must possess or teach himself, training himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance-that is to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is to be-curiosity-to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does, and if you have that, then I don't think the talent makes much difference, whether you've got it or not.

So, never be afraid. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid.

Fear is the most damnable, damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.

She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.

The ideal woman which is in every man's mind is evoked by a word or phrase or the shape of her wrist, her hand. The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement. Remember, all Tolstoy ever said to describe Anna Karenina was that she was beautiful and could see in the dark like a cat. Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.

Success is feminine and like a woman, if you cringe before her, she will override you

Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.

I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and self-respect and whatever courage is demanded, is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Don't bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.

It's all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won't be over until tomorrow.

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich.

A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.

War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.

People need trouble - a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

A man is the sum of his misfortunes.

Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.

Civilization begins with distillation

I don't want money badly enough to work for it.

Truth; that long clean clear simple undeniable unchallengeable straight and shining line, on one side of which black is black and on the other white is white, has now become an angle, a point of view.

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest

If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green... If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won't.

The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.

People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damn fool if he doesn't.

You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.

One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat...nor make love for eight hours...

If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.

Wonder. Go on and wonder.

To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

No one individual can tell the truth.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

The most important thing is insight, that is to be - curious - to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.

No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.

A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune