35 Inspirational William Faulkner Quotes On Success

William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, screenplays, poetry, essays, and a play. He is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life. Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers in American literature generally and Southern literature specifically. Though his work was published as early as 1919 and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner’s renown reached its peak upon the publication of Malcolm Cowley’s The Portable Faulkner and his 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the only Mississippi-born Nobel winner. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), each won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; also on the list were As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932). Absalom, Absalom! (1936) appears on similar lists. Born William Cuthbert Falkner in New Albany, Mississippi, William Faulkner was the first of four sons of Murry Cuthbert Falkner (August 17, 1870 – August 7, 1932) and Maud Butler (November 27, 1871 – October 16, 1960). He had three younger brothers: Murry Charles “Jack” Falkner (June 26, 1899 – December 24, 1975), author John Faulkner (September 24, 1901 – March 28, 1963), and Dean Swift Falkner (August 15, 1907 – November 10, 1935). May these William Faulkner Quotes On Success inspire you to take action so that you may live your dreams.

1. “I say money has no value; it’s just the way you spend it.” William Faulkner

2. “Only when the clock stops does time come to life.” William Faulkner

3. “Be scared. You can’t help that. But don’t be afraid.” William Faulkner

4. “You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.” William Faulkner

5. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” William Faulkner

6. “To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.” William Faulkner

7. “So, never be afraid. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.” William Faulkner

8. “We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.” William Faulkner

9. “Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time.” William Faulkner

10. “She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.” William Faulkner

11. “Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.” William Faulkner

12. “Unless you’re ashamed of yourself now and then, you’re not honest.” William Faulkner

13. “A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.” William Faulkner

14. “Don’t bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.” William Faulkner

15. “They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself; it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.” William Faulkner

16. “Believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.” William Faulkner

17. “Don’t do what you can do – try what you can’t do.” William Faulkner

18. “If there is a God what the hell is He for?” William Faulkner

19. “Our most treasured family heirloom are our sweet family memories. The past is never dead, it is not even past.” William Faulkner

20. “To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.” William Faulkner

21. “I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.” William Faulkner

22. “You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.” William Faulkner

23. “The most important thing is insight, that is to be – curious – to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.” William Faulkner

24. “I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail, because he has a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” William Faulkner

25. “Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.” William Faulkner

26. “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.” William Faulkner

27. “There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn’t fool with booze until he’s fifty; then he’s a damn fool if he doesn’t.” William Faulkner

28. “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.” William Faulkner

29. “No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.” William Faulkner

30. “Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.” William Faulkner

31. “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.” William Faulkner

32. “We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.” William Faulkner

33. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.” William Faulkner

34. “Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.” William Faulkner

35. “If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green, If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.” William Faulkner

I hope you enjoyed these William Faulkner Quotes On Success. Do let us know which one was your favorite in the comments section below.

Check Out William Faulkner – Two Time Pullitzer Prize Winner & Poet-Novelist of Mississippi | Mini Bio | BIO:

Have A Great Day!