60 Inspirational William Faulkner Quotes (LIFE)

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.

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

A gentleman can live through anything.

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

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely.

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

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

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

Nothing matters but breath, breathing, to know and to be alive.

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

The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.

Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.

The next time you try to seduce anyone, don’t do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

Love doesn’t die; the men and women do.

Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it.

The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything good.

A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station.

Don’t be ‘a writer.’ Be writing.

It’s not when you realize that nothing can help you – religion, pride, anything – it’s when you realize that you don’t need any aid.

Clocks slay time. Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

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

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.

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

It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.

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

And sure enough, even waiting will end… if you can just wait long enough.

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

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

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

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

I decline to accept the end of man.

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

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

I’m bad and I’m going to hell, and I don’t care. I’d rather be in hell than anywhere where you are.

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.

Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly is having to accept it.

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

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.

Wonder. Go on and wonder.

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

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.