Quote

Our knowledge of what the richer than ourselves possess, and the poor do not, has never been more widespread. Therefore, envy, which is wanting what others have, and jealousy, which is not wanting others to have what one has, have never been more widespread.

John Fowles

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John Fowles
Age: 79 †
Born: 1926
Born: March 31
Died: 2005
Died: November 5
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Leigh-on-Sea
Essex
Wanting
Envy
Therefore
Knowledge
Poor
Widespread
Others
Richer
Never
Jealousy
Possess

More quotes by John Fowles

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I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.
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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.
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The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke. We're so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we're stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can't stand ours.
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The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
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She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.
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That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
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His statement to himself should have been, 'I possess this now, therefore I am happy', instead of what it so Victorianly was: I cannot possess this for ever, and therefore am sad.
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Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
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Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.
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The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
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Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.
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There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.
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The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.
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Content is a word unknown to life it is also a word unknown to man.
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The absurdly neurotic role you and the rest of your kind have always attributed to me Erato, the Goddess Muse of Erotic Poetry bears no relation at all to reality. As a matter of fact, I was trained as a clinical psychologist. Who simply happens to have specialized in the mental illness that you, in your ignorance, call literature.
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I read and I read and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.
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I am going to explain to you why we went to war. Why mankind always goes to war. It is not social or political. It is not countries that go to war, but men. It is like salt. Once one has been to war, one has salt for the rest of one's life. Do you understand?
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You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.
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I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.
John Fowles