William Golding Quotes

I think the healthy way to live is to make friends with the beast inside oneself, and that means not the beast but the shadow. The dark side of one's nature. Have fun with it and you know, is to accept everything about ourselves.

I definitely have a dark side of me that can be pretty vicious... as we all do.

It's almost as if we each have a vampire inside us. Controlling that beast, that dark side, is what fascinates me.

The truth is that humans have the potential to be horrific. And I think being conscious of that is important.

We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives... inside ourselves.

Everybody has a dark side. It's just we are very in touch with it.

Good people struggle against what's imperfect about them. The people that we call 'bad' people embrace that kind of stuff, embrace the darker side.

Everyone has darkness inside them, however hidden.

If thou has not seen the devil, look at thine own self.

In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.

What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.

Survival," I said softly. "It's selfish, and it's dark, and we've always been a species willing to do anything to satisfy our needs. Individuals have morals. Mobs have appetites.

The greatest evil that one has to fight constantly, every minute of the day until one dies, is the worst part of oneself.

Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.

In solitude there grows what anyone brings into it, the inner beast too. Therefore solitude is inadvisable to many.

Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?

The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.

The man who kills a man kills a man. The man who kills himself kills all men. As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.

Sometimes I think there's a beast that lives inside me, in the cavern that's where my heart should be, and every now and then it fills every last inch of my skin, so that I can't help but do something inappropriate. Its breath is full of lies; it smells of spite.

We all have a Monster within; the difference is in degree, not in kind.

If a man carefully examine his thoughts he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future. His well-being is always ahead. Such a creature is probably immortal.

The men and women who are truly filled with light are those who have gazed deeply into the darkness of their own imperfect existence.

And everybody has the motivation to be that killer.

To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.

If you stare into the Abyss long enough the Abyss stares back at you.