V. S. Naipaul Quotes

Leave it to a naive world-saver like you to view our love as a Sacred Cause when in actual fact all it was was some barking at the moon.

God save us from idealists! They dream of a world without injustice, and what crime won't they commit to get it! I swear, Mirella, I'll settle for a world with good manners.

The realities of the world seldom measure up to the sublime designs of human imagination.

As a child, I wanted to marry a farmer, but no doubt the reality would have been very different to the idyll in my head.

When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.

Nobody should pin their hopes on a miracle.

Most of us...are naturally more sanguine and hopeful than logic would justify. We seem to be so constituted that in the absence of any facts to go upon we are happy and self-satisfied; so that the effect of experience is continually to contract our hopes and aspirations

Once we reach a certain age, we tend to recalibrate our expectations. We expect less from the world once we've seen it up close.

Apparently, the world is not a wish granting factory.

Reality is never a golden age.

You seemed to me to be soaring far up in the blue - to be sailing in the bright light, over the heads of men. Suddenly some one tosses up a faded rosebud - a missile that should never have reached you - and down you drop to the ground.

I assure you that the world is not so amusing as we imagined.

She said, 'Believe it or not, I used to be idealistic.' I asked her what 'idealistic' meant. 'It means you live by what you think is right.' 'You don't do that anymore?' 'There are questions I don't ask anymore.

Now I admit that the notion of a warless world is a pleasant and attractive thought. But people who believe that there can be such a thing should ask it of Santa Claus, in whom they doubtless also believe.

… the world will indulge you just so long Asher Lev. Then it will stop. You will simply have to grow accustomed to that truth.

Loving the ideal more than the reality is the cause of all the misery the human species creates for itself.

The only way to keep a dream, any dream at all, to keep a dream perfect and rosy and intact and unsullied is never to live it out.

The sense of all stylistic change is that the underlying view of the world changes.

We’d met at a carefree time, a moment full of promise, in its place now were the harsh lessons of the real world.

We will continue to chase rainbows unless we recognize that they are rainbows and there is no pot of gold at the end of them

idealism, that gaudy coloring matter of passion, fades when it is brought beneath the trenchant white light of knowledge. Ideals, like mountains, are best at a distance.

Illusions are hazardous, and so are disillusions.

Intelligent people make many mistakes because they cannot believe the world is really as foolish as it is.

If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.

Rose-colored glasses are never made in bifocals. Nobody wants to read the small print in dreams.