Quotes by British Authors - Page 226

Life is fleeting, and the wonder can be lost within the confusion of worldly reality.
Steven Redhead
Spurgeon challenges us to go to the river of our experience, to pull up bulrushes, and to place them in the Ark of our memory, experiencing again the wonder that allowed our infant faith to flourish.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
If you're not at the front, you're not in the race.
David Millar
Looking back into childhood is like turning a telescope the wrong way around. Everything appears in miniature, but with a clarity it probably does not deserve; moreover it has become concentrated and stylized, taking shape in symbolism. Thus it is that I sometimes see my infant self as having been set down before a blank slate on which to construct a map or schema of the external world, and as hesitantly beginning to sketch it, with many false starts and much rubbing-out, the anatomy of my universe. Happiness and sorrow, love and friendship, hostility, a sense of guilt and more abstract concepts still, must all find a place somewhere, much as an architect lays out the plan of a house he is designing - hall, dining-room and bedrooms - but must not forget the bathroom. In a child’s map, too, some of the rooms are connected by a serving-hatch, while others are sealed off behind baize doors. How can the fragments possibly be combined to make sense? Yet this map or finished diagram, constructed in the course of ten or twelve years’ puzzling, refuses to be ignored, and for some time to come will make itself felt as bones through flesh, to emerge as the complex organism which adults think of as their philosophy of life. Presumably it has its origins in both heredity and enviorment. So with heredity I shall begin.
Frances Partridge
A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car.
Kenneth Tynan
The trick is to learn from your mistakes, and have the courage to be true to your heart.
Cinderpelt
Used every man according to his capacity.
Mary Stewart
How do I know that you exist?That's just it. I don't!
Anthony T.Hincks
Now and then, an inch below the water's surface, the muscles of his stomach tightened involuntarily as he recalled another detail. A drop of water on her upper arm. Wet. An embroidered flower, a simple daisy, sewn between the cups of her bra. Her breasts wide apart and small. On her back, a mole half covered by a strap. When she climbed out of the pond a glimpse of the triangular darkness her knickers were supposed to conceal. Wet. He saw it, he made himself see it again. The way her pelvic bones stretched the material clear of the skin, the deep curve of her waist, her startling whiteness. When she reached for her skirt, a carelessly raised foot revealed a patch of soil on each pad of her sweetly diminished toes. Another mole the size of a farthing on her thigh and something purplish on her calf--a strawberry mark, a scar. Not blemishes. Adornments.
Ian McEwan
Mrs. Bittarcy rustled ominously, holding her peace meanwhile. She feared long words she did not understand. Beelzebub lay hid among too many syllables.("The Man Whom The Trees Loved")
Algernon Blackwood
A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
C.S. Lewis
Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim
Graham Greene
Strategy is about out-thinking your competition. Mark Zuckerberg, while at Harvard, built a website called Facemash ‘for fun’. Even today, Facebook believe that ‘done is better than perfect’.
Max McKeown
... a whole day’s tête-à-tête between two women can never end without a quarrel.
Jane Austen
We and all our existences are non-entities. Thou art the absolute being whose appearance is transitory.
Idries Shah
We don't really know anything. Those who accept this are more likely to learn something.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.
Jane Austen
It was a pretty sight, and a seasonable one, that met their eyes when they flung the door open. In the fore-court, lit by the dim rays of a horn lantern, some eight or ten little field-mice stood in a semicircle, red worsted comforters round their throats, their fore-paws thrust deep into their pockets, their feet jigging for warmth. With bright beady eyes they glanced shyly at each other, sniggering a little, sniffing and applying coat-sleeves a good deal. As the door opened, one of the elder ones that carried the lantern was just saying, "Now then, one, two, three!" and forthwith their shrill little voices uprose on the air, singing one of the old-time carols that their forefathers composed in fields that were fallow and held by frost, or when snow-bound in chimney corners, and handed down to be sung in the miry street to lamp-lit windows at Yule-time.
Kenneth Grahame
Facing up to non-being enables us to put our life into perspective, see it in its entirety, and thereby lend it a sense of direction and unity. If the ultimate source of anxiety is fear of the future, the future ends in death; and if the ultimate source of anxiety is uncertainty, death is the only certainty. It is only by facing up to death, accepting its inevitability, and integrating it into life that we can escape from the pettiness and paralysis of anxiety, and, in so doing, free ourselves to make the most out of our lives and out of ourselves.
Neel Burton
I soon forgot about my bedraggled appearance. Until, that is, an old man shuffled in and propped himself, hunched and wheezing, over the check-in desk. Karen asked him if he needed assistance. “No,” he grunted sucking on his teeth, “your wet-T-shirt librarian with the punk rock hair is helping me out just fine.
Suzanne Kelman
Do you want to stick needles in the living or scalpels in the dead?
Alice Broadway
I've decided I don't like books that end with 'The End'. The fact that there are no more pages, suggests to me that the book has ended.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
The greatest gift a parent can leave a child is that parent's own independence.
Rosamunde Pilcher
People only know what you tell them.And it was true.People gave out their whole life stories to anyone and everyone without a second's thought.Stand at a bus stop,sit in a strange pub,get banged up,and someone would always give you their life story.It was as if they were trying to prove they existed
Martina Cole
In their quest for power and self-importance, to compensate for whatever feelings of social inadequacy or sexual insecurity, they (Politicians)are prepared to perpetrate something which is hard to distinguish from mass murder if they think they can get away with it...
Auberon Waugh
They are my men and this ship my responsibility. I vowed no woman would ever alter my path. Yet I kept them from ending you, and it makes me sick to the gut, for I would still rather die myself than see one hair on your head damaged by another man.
Saskia Walker
A life was owned by the person who lived it, he believed. What happened didn't always happen because you wanted it to, but what you made of it was your responsibility.
Howard Jacobson
A forest is not a wilderness, but a community of souls who speak to one another on the wind.
Anthony T.Hincks
I’m not denying their kindness,” said the Rani. “But after all kindness isn’t the only virtue.
Aldous Huxley
As I see it the world is undoubtedly in need of a new religion, and that religion must be founded on humanist principles. When I say religion, I do not mean merely a theology involving belief in a supernatural god or gods; nor do I mean merely a system of ethics, however exalted; nor only scientific knowledge, however extensive; nor just a practical social morality, however admirable or efficient. I mean an organized system of ideas and emotions which relate man to his destiny, beyond and above the practical affairs of every day, transcending the present and the existing systems of law and social structure. The prerequisite today is that any such religion shall appeal potentially to all mankind; and that its intellectual and rational sides shall not be incompatible with scientific knowledge but on the contrary based on it.
Julian Huxley
The first finding that jumped out at us was that it is possible to learn too much ! In the tournament, investing lots of time in learning was not at all effective. In fact, we found a strong negative correlation between the proportion of a strategy's moves that were INNOVATE or OBSERVE, as opposed to EXPLOIT, and how well the strategy performed. Successful strategies spent only a small fraction of their time (5-10%) learning, and the bulk of their time caching in on what they had learned, through playing EXPLOIT. Only through playing EXPLOIT can a strategy directly accrue fitness. Hencem every time a strategy chooses to learn new behavior, be it through playing INNOVATE or OBSERVE, there is a cost corresponding to the payoff that would have been received had EXPLOIT been played instead. This implied that the way to get on in life was to do a very quick bit of learning and then EXPLOIT, EXPLOIT, EXPLOIT until you die. That is a sobering lesson for someone like myself who has spent his whole life in school or university.
Kevin N. Laland
When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals.
Arthur Conan Doyle
And where colours likeA rainbow dance alive, asWisdom’s arrows rain downAnd ages come to pass.
Marie Symeou
We all need something that takes us out of day to day and reminds us that it's all ok."
Ian Tucker
Wherein lies happiness? In that which becksOur ready minds to fellowship divine,A fellowship with essence; till we shine,Full alchemiz’d, and free of space. BeholdThe clear religion of heaven!
John Keats
Do you remember what we just did? Please tell me you remember what we just did."She briefly toyed with the idea of lying and saying no, just to see the look on his face, but she'd had enough of having her brain played with – it wouldn't be too sporting to do the same to him. "Yes, I remember, and don't you think for one minute that just because you had me on my back screaming I was 'yours'," she waved four fingers in quotation marks in front of his face, "that it gives you any kind of ownership over me, because it doesn't."He looked annoyed, then relieved, then he laughed. "Yeah, whatever, baby.
Dianna Hardy
you're quite wrong there, Collie. One does miss sex. The body has a life of it's own. We do miss what we haven't had, you and I. Biologically. Ask Sigmund Freud. It is revealed in dreams. The absent touch of warm limbs at night, the absent
Muriel Spark
People shouldn't be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.
Alan Moore
False love, desire, and beauty frail, adieu! Dead is the root whence all these fancies grew.
Walter Raleigh
He didn’t ask himself if she was beautiful, because the physical effect of her presence made the question insignificant.
Sebastian Faulks
Why did I allow the abuse to continue? Even as a teenager?I didn’t. Something that had been plaguing me for years now made sense. It was like the answer to a terrible secret. The thing is, it wasn’t me in my bed, it was Shirley who lay the wondering if that man was going to come to her room, pull back the cover and push his penis into her waiting mouth it was Shirley. I remembered watching her, a skinny little thing with no breasts and a dark resentful expression. She was angry. She didn’t want this man in her room doing the things he did, but she didn’t know how to stop it. He didn’t beat her, he didn’t threaten her. He just looked at her with black hypnotic eyes and she lay back with her legs apart thinking about nothing at all. And where was I? I stood to one side, or hovered overhead just below the ceiling, or rode on a magic carpet. I held my breath and watched my father pushing up and down inside Shirley’s skinny body.
Alice Jamieson
A few nights after his conversion he asked how long this Gospel had been known in England. He was told that we had known it for some hundreds of years."What!" said he, amazed; "is it possible that for hundreds of years you have had the knowledge of those glad tidings in your possession, and yet have only now come to preach it to us? My father sought after the Truth for more than twenty years, and died without finding it. Oh, why did you not come sooner?
Hudson Taylor
La filosofía nos enseña a sentir incertidumbre ante las cosas que nos parecen evidentes. La propaganda, en cambio, nos enseña a aceptar como evidentes cosas sobre las que sería razonable suspender nuestro juicio o sentir dudas.
Aldous Huxley
Are we allowing individuals to develop their talents with our current teaching methods? Is there more or maybe less we should be doing?
Adele Devine
Assassination is murder with a touch more precision. Brother Sim is precise.
Mark Lawrence
What troubled me most is that although I was an unwilling observer, I felt guilty myself as if something in what I witnessed touched a shameful and repressed desire.
John Mole
It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.
G.K. Chesterton
Hell is truth known too late.
J.C. Ryle
The problem is that, when places like Saudi Arabia just implement the penal code, and don’t provide the social and economic justice of the Sharia—the whole package—they simply engender hatred toward the Sharia.
Anjem Choudary
I am quite sure that our views on evolution would be very different had biologists studied genetics and natural selection before and not after most of them were convinced that evolution had occurred.
J.B.S. Haldane
Well, He had known what love was-a sharp pang, a fierce experience, in the midst of whose flames he was struggling! but, through that furnace he would fight his way out into the serenity of middle age,-all the richer and more human for having known this great passion.
Elizabeth Gaskell
But the future must be met, however stern and iron it be.
Elizabeth Gaskell
No. Really. I've thought about it a lot. You learn to live with it, with them. Because they do stay with you, even if they're not living, breathing people any more. It's not the same crushing grief you felt at first, the kind that swamps you, and makes you want to cry in the wrong places and get irrationally angry with all the idiots who are still alive when the person you love is dead. It's just something you learn to accommodate. Like adapting around a whole. I don't know. It's like you become... a doughnut instead of a bun.
Jojo Moyes
She had never been able to tolerate dishonesty, which she thought threatened the very heart of relationships between people. If you could not count on other people to mean what they said, or to do what they said they would do, then life could become utterly unpredictable. The fact that we could trust one another made it possible to undertake the simple tasks of life.
Alexander McCall Smith
Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.
Adam Phillips
Anyway, I heard you and your Mother-in-Law kicked ass! Shame his daddy'o wasn't around for the family reunion, although I doubted a battle is the right way to say 'hi,my name's Kiera and I am sexing up your son's man stick.
Stephanie Hudson
from CHAOS?Trust the imagination - lines and shapes revealed - space and light instead of blackness. Silence being tentative, tender life of universe.
Jay Woodman
...listening with absorbed attention more to her voice than to what she was saying, and thinking how like she was, flowering through her voice into beauty in the darkness, to some butterflies he had come across in the Swiss mountains the summer before. When they were folded up they were grey, mothlike creatures that one might easily overlook, but directly they opened their wings they became the loveliest things in the world, all rose-colour or heavenly blue. So had she been to him in the daylight that afternoon,--an ordinary woman, not in any way noticeable; but now listen to her, opening into beauty on the wings of her voice!
Elizabeth von Arnim
It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting "Cathy" and banging your head against a tree.
Helen Fielding
If you ever looked at me once with what I know is in you, I would be your slave.
Emily Brontë