Burmese Days Quotes

To talk, simply to talk! It sounds so little, and how much it is! When you have existed to the brink of middle age in bitter loneliness, among people to whom your true opinion on every subject on earth is blasphemy, the need to talk is the greatest of all needs.

Painting is the only art that can be practised without either talent or hard work.

A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.

You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself.

When a man has a black face, suspicion is proof.

Prestige, the breath of life, is itself nebulous.

Much better hang wrong fellow than no fellow.

Most people can be at ease in a foreign country only when they are disparaging the inhabitants.

It is perhaps one’s own fault, to see oneself drifting, rotting, in dishonour and horrible futility, and all the while knowing that somewhere within one there is the possibility of a decent human being.

It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life.

It is devilish to suffer from a pain that is all but nameless. Blessed are they who are stricken only with classifiable diseases! Blessed are the poor, the sick, the crossed in love, for at least other people know what is the matter with them and will listen to their belly-achings with sympathy. But who that has not suffered it understands the pain of exile?

It is a corrupting thing to live one’s real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.