Quotes by British Authors - Page 178

To understand the extreme lengths to which the Sufis were prepared to go in reading esoteric meanings into the quite simple language of their Scriptures, it is necessary to remember that the Koran was committed to memory by all deeply religious men and women, and recited constantly, aloud or in the heart; so that the mystic was in a state of uninterrupted meditation upon the Holy Book. Many passages which would otherwise pass without special notice were therefore bound to arrest their attention, already sufficiently alert, and to quicken their imagination, already fired by the discipline of their austerities and the rigor of their internal life.
A.J. Arberry
The evening that Al and I met became the night that we met. By the time we fell asleep at daybreak we were different people
Ruth Ahmed
A man has a very insecure tenure of a property which another can carry away with his eyes. A few months reduced me to the cruel necessity either of destroying my machine, or of giving it to the public. To destroy it, I could not think of; to give up that for which I had laboured so long, was cruel. I had no patent, nor the means of purchasing one. In preference to destroying, I gave it to the public.[On his inability to keep for himself a profitable income from his invention of the Spinning Mule.]
Samuel Crompton
Talent is the presence of ability and absence of understanding about the source and operation of knowledge.
Idries Shah
At the small table, sitting very upright, was one of the ugliest old ladies he had ever seen. It was an ugliness of distinction - it fascinated rather than repelled.
Agatha Christie
Well, but you affirm that virtue is only elicited by temptation; - and you think that a woman cannot be too little exposed to temptation, or too little acquainted with vice, or anything connected therewith – It must be, either, that you think she is essentially so vicious, or so feeble-minded that she cannot withstand temptation, - and though she may be pure and innocent as long as she is kept in ignorance and restraint, yet, being destitute of real virtue, to teach her how to sin is at once to make her a sinner...
Anne Brontë
It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a little glint of flame. Do you know how sometimes on very fine days the sun will shine with a particular intensity that makes the most mundane objects in the landscape glow with an unusual radiance, so that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting, even beautiful? Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time.
Bill Bryson
The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.
Christopher Hitchens
Tomorrow’s victory is today’s practice.
Chris Bradford
An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives.
Christopher Hitchens
The boy I once was is a stranger to me, and sometimes I wonder if terrible experiences are enough to change a person - I mean fundamentally to change a person's nature - or if they merely subdue it, and it endures there beneath, and will reassert itself in time. I wonder if I will be recognized by my family. If those I love will still know me.
Peter Hobbs
Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of perpetual promise. Summer in its turn soon begins to sweat for something to quench its heat, and the mellowest of autumns will tire of gentility at last, and ache for a quick sharp frost to kill its fruitfulness. Even winter — the hardest season, the most implacable — dreams, as February creeps on, of the flame that will presently melt it away. Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself.
Clive Barker
The truth is that creative activity is one that involves the entire self - our emotions, our levels of energy, our characters, and our minds.
Robert Greene
The geometer offers to the physicist a whole set of maps from which to choose. One map, perhaps, will fit the facts better than others, and then the geometry which provides that particular map will be the geometry most important for applied mathematics.
G H Hardy
This was a little house, with a ceiling that kept getting higher and higher, a hot place with no windows. This was anger.
Helen Oyeyemi
Rob; you could have been someone I wanted to be with. But you’re not; you never spoke to Niall, not really. You joked and you danced, but how often did you really talk? You never even told him you loved him until it was already too late. What was he to you? A friend? A lover? Or was he just some set piece in Rob Sardan’s great story? Is that what everyone is to you? Can’t we have our own story?
Joel Cornah
We want the Church to be small not only that fewer men may know the Enemy but also that those who do may acquire the uneasy intensity and the defensive self-righteousness of a secret society or a clique.
C.S. Lewis
The perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.
Angela Carter
For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.
George Orwell
Then there are some minor points that strike me as suggestive - for instance, the position of Mrs. Hubbard's sponge bag, the name of Mrs. Armstrong's mother, the detective methods of Mr. Hardman, the suggestion of Mr. MacQueen that Ratchett himself destroyed the charred note we found, Princess Dragomiroff's Christian name, and a grease spot on a Hungarian passport.
Agatha Christie
What job do you want to do?And I see them all hanging up before me, like clothes on a rack, all the jobs, tinker, tailor, soldier, and you have to pick one and then you have to pretend for the rest of your life that that's what you are. So they aint no different really from accidents of birth. I didn't know that phrase then but I learnt it later. It's a good phrase...
Graham Swift
Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal of a world run by an oligarchy in possession of Teutonic genes, who may kill or enslave other 'races' according to need, is not more unrealizable than the idea that a single state, let alone the globe itself, could be governed according to the dictates of an allegedly holy book. This mad scheme begins by denying itself the talents (and the rights) of half the population, views with superstitious horror the charging of interest, and invokes the right of Muslims to subject nonbelievers to special taxes and confiscations. Not even Afghanistan or Somalia, scenes of the furthest advances yet made by pro-caliphate forces, could be governed for long in this way without setting new standards for beggary and decline.
Christopher Hitchens
Hard it is to suffer through stupid people. They make you feel sorry for them, and if your sorrow is as great as your hurt, you will allow them to go free of punishment, for their eyes are the eyes of dogs that have done wrong and know it, and are afraid.
Richard Llewellyn
A man vows, and yet will not east away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow.
George Eliot
It is be­cause freedom means the renun­ciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Animals are locked in a perpetual present. They can learn from recent events, but they are easily distracted by what is in front of their eyes. Slowly, over a great period of time, our ancestors overcame this basic animal weakness. By looking long enough at any object and refusing to be distracted—even for a few seconds—they could momentarily detach themselves from their immediate surroundings. In this way they could notice patterns, make generalizations, and think ahead. They had the mental distance to think and reflect, even on the smallest scale.These early humans evolved the ability to detach and think as their primary advantage in the struggle to avoid predators and find food. It connected them to a reality other animals could not access. Thinking on this level was the single greatest turning point in all of evolution—the emergence of the conscious, reasoning mind.
Robert Greene
These were dangerous thoughts, he knew. They were the kind that crept up on a Watchman when the chase was over and it was just you and him, facing one another in that breathless little pinch between the crime and the punishment.And maybe a Watchman had seen civilization with the skin ripped off one time too many and stopped acting like a Watchman and started acting like a normal human being and realized that the click of the crossbow or the sweep of the sword would make all the world so clean.And you couldn’t think like that, even about vampires. Even though they’d take the lives of other people because little lives don’t matter and what the hell can we take away from them?And, too, you couldn’t think like that because they gave you a sword and a badge and that turned you into something else and that had to mean there were some thoughts you couldn’t think.Only crimes could take place in darkness. Punishment had to be done in the light. That was the job of a good Watchman, Carrot always said. To light a candle in the dark.
Terry Pratchett
I am a part of all that I have met.
Alfred Tennyson
Any fool can break something, criticise someone and tear things apart. It takes a far more skilled, wise and kind soul to build something, nurture someone, fix things and help others thrive over time.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
It is unjust to claim the privileges of age and retain the playthings of childhood.
Samuel Johnson
To be busy with material affairs is the best preservative against reflection fears doubts.... I suppose a fellow proposing to cut his throat would experience a sort of relief while occupied in stropping his razor carefully.
Joseph Conrad
If we would remember that all the trees of earth are marked for the woodman's axe, we should not be so ready to build our nests in them.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
I thought the fart was a human thing. It's something to do with like, arse cheeks, or whatever.
Karl Pilkington
The first time she saw the boy across the classroom, Ah Lee knew she was in love because she tasted durian on her tongue.
Zen Cho
You are a romantic. Marry this woman. Have children. Stepping in baby shit will soon drive thoughts of romance from you.
Gavin G. Smith
It is a pity he did not write in pencil. As you have no doubt frequently observed, the impression usually goes through -- a fact which has dissolved many a happy marriage.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born...Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole. - Vida Winter
Diane Setterfield
Those people work more wisely who seek to achieve good in their own small corner of the world ... than those who are forever thinking that life is in vain unless one can ... do big things.
Herbert Butterfield
The soul hardly ever realizes it, but whether he is a believer or not, his loneliness is really a homesickness for God.
Hubert Van Zeller
A loan is the scissors of friendship.A man's own tongue may cut his throat.The cage has no value without the bird.
Idries Shah
He told me he was used to getting what he wanted.
Celia Conrad
Hope-that unshakable golden belief that things can get better- is why I'm here talking to you now. Without it, we are nothing.
Alexander Gordon Smith
Humility is to make a right estimate of oneself.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
If I discover within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
C.S. Lewis
She had not thought it would be so easy to slip into the old roles. Cambridge had changed her fundamentally and she thought she was immune. No one in her family, however, noticed the transformation in her, and she was not able to resist the power of their habitual expectations.
Ian McEwan
If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.
Peter Shaffer
I used to think I had all the time in the world to do everything I wanted. But what's the use of having all the time in the world if you're always wasting it on things that don't mean a thing?
Mike Gayle
Time is the greatest and longest-established spinner of all. ... His factory is a secret place his work noiseless and his hands are mutes.
Charles Dickens
For years I'd been trying to forget..., locking it up and burying it deep in my memory. The journey... had shattered that, bringing it all back - but now that I'd faced it, I found to my surprise that the fear had been worse than the reality.
Benedict Jacka
Much, much later. when I am back home and being treated for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I will be enabled to see what was going on in my mind immediately after 11 August.I am still capable of operating mechanically as a soldier in these following days. But operating mechanically as a soldier is now all I am capable of.Martin says he is worried about me. He says I have the thousand-yard stare'.Of course, I cannot see this stare. But by now we both have more than an idea what it means.So, among all the soldiers here, this is nothing to be ashamed of. But as it really does just go with the territory we find ourselves in. it is just as equally not a badge of h
Jake Wood
The sufis believe that they can experience something more complete.
Idries Shah
Love your life. Because your life is what you have to give.
Tom Hiddleston
Always think in terms of solutions. Focusing on the problems usually gives us more of them.
Sam Owen
Did you know, ji,’ Zulu offered, ‘that the map of Tolkien’s Middle earth fits quite well over central England and Wales? Maybe all fairylands are right here, in our midst.
Salman Rushdie
From ... the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. ... I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.
George Orwell
BUT MOST PEOPLE ARE RATHER STUPID AND WASTE THEIR LIVES. HAVE YOU NOT SEEN THAT? HAVE YOU NOT LOOKED DOWN FROM THE HORSE AT A CITY AND THOUGHT HOW MUCH IT RESEMBLED AN ANT HEAP, FULL OF BLIND CREATURES WHO THINK THEIR MUNDANE LITTLE WORLD WAS REAL? YOU SEE THE LIGHTED WINDOWS AND WHAT YOU WANT TO THINK IS THAT THERE MAY BE MANY INTERESTING STORIES BEHIND THEM, BUT WHAT YOU KNOW IS THAT REALLY THERE ARE JUST DULL, DULL SOULS, MERE CONSUMERS OF FOOD, WHO THINK THEIR INSTINCTS ARE EMOTIONS AND THEIR TINY LITTLE LIVES OF MORE ACCOUNT THAN A WHISPER OF WIND.The blue glow was bottmless. It seemed to be sucking her own thoughts out of her mind.'No,' whispered Susan, 'no, I've never thought like that.'Death stood up abruptly and turned away. YOU MAY FIND OUT THAT IT HELPS, he said.
Terry Pratchett
I don't have the type of ambition that will make me do anything at any cost to get what I want. I don't want to be beholden to people. I don't want to open a shop with your money because I don't want to be indebted to you.""I'm your husband; it's our money.""Morally, legally, maybe yes, but in here," she put a hand to her head "and here," she lay the flat of her hand over her heart, "it's your money. You earned it or were given it way before you met me.
Dorothy Koomson
Without compassion, you will never truly connect with another human being.
Emma J. Bell
Thought creates character.
Annie Besant
I find it hard to understand the mind of the true atheist, who believes that life is nothing more than a series of electrical impulses and biochemical reactions to chemical stimuli. Presumably, such thinkers see death as the worst thing that can occur, because it means the end of everything. Therefore (logically), maintaining the continuance of physical existence, under any circumstances, is entirely justifiable.
Jennifer Worth