Quotes by British Authors - Page 235

Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
John Fowles
In an era of weaponized sensitivity, participation in public discourse is growing so perilous, so fraught with the danger of being caught out for using the wrong word or failing to uphold the latest orthodoxy in relation to disability, sexual orientation, economic class, race or ethnicity, that many are apt to bow out. Perhaps intimidating their elders into silence is the intention of the identity-politics cabal — and maybe my generation should retreat to our living rooms and let the young people tear one another apart over who seemed to imply that Asians are good at math.
Lionel Shriver
A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.
Alan W. Watts
Most people feel that the world looks like the photograph. I've always assumed that the photograph is nearly right, but that little bit by which it misses makes it miss by a mile. This is what I grope at.
Martin Gayford
The Secret Garden was what Mary called it when she was thinking of it. She liked the name, and she liked still more the feeling that when its beautiful old walls shut her in no one knew where she was. It seemed almost like being shut out of the world in some fairy place. The few books she had read and liked had been fairy-story books, and she had read of secret gardens in some of the stories. Sometimes people went to sleep in them for a hundred years, which she had thought must be rather stupid. She had no intention of going to sleep, and, in fact, she was becoming wider awake every day which passed at Misselthwaite.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Aldous Huxley
If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather.Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness they’re going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.
Stephen Fry
Beauty is truth, truth beauty
John Keats
Opportunity's precious, and time is a sword.
Idries Shah
A word of warning here. The events as you remember them will never be the same in your memory once you have turned them into a memoir. For years I have worried that if I turn all of my life into literature, I won't have any real life left - just stories about it. And it is a realistic concern: it does happen like that. I am no longer sure I remember how it felt to be twenty and living in Spain after my parents died; my book about it stands now between me and my memories. When I try to think about that time, what comes to mind most readily is what I wrote.
Judith Barrington
It is not great counts God blesses so much as likeness to Jesus.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
... the irregularities of the motion of Uranus...in order to find out whether they may be attributed to the action of an undiscovered planet beyond it.[John Couch Adams on how he began to discover Neptune.]
John Couch Adams
They are girls to whom things happen, and they take it hard. But I bear myself as more than a silly girl. I am the daughter of a water goddess. I am a woman with water in her veins and power in her breeding. I am a woman who makes things happen, and I am not defeated yet. I am not defeated by a boy with a newly won crown, and no man will ever walk away from me certain that he won’t walk back.
Philippa Gregory
Only a real man has the right to stand at the pinnacle.
James Clavell
Whatever modern democracies may tell themselves about their commitment to free speech and to diversity of opinion, the values of a given society will uncannily match those of whichever organizations have the scale to pay for runs of thirty-second slots around the nightly news bulletin.
Alain de Botton
Women were very queer. Unexpectedly cruel and unexpectedly kind.
Agatha Christie
The woman with hair of flames knelt over me. She might have been pretty if not for the anger in every corner of her face. Emerald eyes glowed with almost seeping venom as her nostrils flared. - Lord Tristan Dracanburh, Ethandun
Alexandra May
In her past were sweet passages, in her future rosy hopes.
Charlotte Brontë
In great thick dusty books he readAnd hardly ever went to bedBefore it was e
Mervyn Peake
I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.
Alan Turing
. . . clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.
Virginia Woolf
All cases are unique and very similar to others.
T.S Eliot
The candle burned the moth:But soon it will vanish in its own fat.
Idries Shah
You can't help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn't spell it right; but spelling isn't everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn't count.
A.A. Milne
Progress had not invaded, science had not enlightened, the little hamlet of Pieuvrot, in Brittany. They were a simple, ignorant, superstitious set who lived there, and the luxuries of civilization were known to them as little as its learning. They toiled hard all the week on the ungrateful soil that yielded them but a bare subsistence in return; they went regularly to mass in the little rock-set chapel on Sundays and saint’s days; believed implicitly all that monsieur le cure said to them, and many things which he did not say; and they took all the unknown, not as magnificent but as diabolical
Eliza Lynn Linton
One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without a name.
Walter Scott
The trouble about God is that he is like a person who never acknowledges your letters and so in time you come to the conclusion either that he does not exist or that you have got his address wrong.
C.S. Lewis
He worked with her as she was and not as he wanted her to be.
Colin Clark
The Soviet state was, in fact, almost perfectly designed to make people unhappy. It denied its citizens not just hope, but also trust. Every activity had to be sanctioned by the state. Any person could be an informant. No action could be guaranteed to be without consequence. Father Dmitry preached friendship and warmth and belief to his parishioners, and inspired a generation to live as humans and not as parts of a machine.
Oliver Bullough
You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.
John Bunyan
That is the worst thing about despair: it is not constant, any more than love is.
Amanda Craig
Surely,” he said, “the great mountains of the world are a present remedy if men did but know it against our modern discontent and ambitions. In the hills is wisdom’s fount. They are deep in time. They know the ways of the sun and the wind, the lightning’s fiery feet, the frost that shattereth, the rain that shroudeth, the snow that putteth about their nakedness a softer coverlet than fine lawn.
E.R. Eddison
And people who believe in God think God has put human beings on earth because they think human beings are the best animal, but human beings are just an animal and they will evolve into another animal, and that animal will be cleverer and it will put human beings into a zoo, like we put chimpanzees and gorillas into a zoo. Or human beings will all catch a disease and die out or they will make too much pollution and kill themselves, and then there will only be insects in the world and they will be the best animal.
Mark Haddon
Als it is hard for America to fight wars in the name of freedom, if those people themselves choose for nonfreedom. Can America and England save India from communism, if they vote communist themselves.
Oswald Mosley
If you can't do anything about it, laugh like hell.
David Cook
If we can accept the laws of the universe, the ebb and flow of joy and tragedy, then we have everything we need to embrace our true freedom.
Sarah Winman
Meditation is both the symbol and expression of our intention to grow. Sitting still, alone with our thoughts and feelings, we can honor missed opportunities, passing desires, remembered disappointments, as well as our inner strength, personal wisdom, and ability to forgive and love.
Sebastian Pole
Life is better than death I believe if only because it is less boring and because it has fresh peaches in it.
Thomas Walker
I believe in spectacles, but I think eyes necessary too.
John Stuart Mill
He had been inspired to start a career in the porn industry after reading the incredible tale of a Japanese man who avenged the death of his sister by going down on her best friend for seven days and seven nights.
Mark Jackman
It is unclear if corporate governments are truly the dunces of human health or if they are just faking it in order to propagate a biologically toxic agenda on an unsuspecting global population.
Steven Magee
But feelings aren't like thoughts, they can't be changed at will.
Dorothy Koomson
Mechanism! Everywhere -- mechanism! Devices for getting away from life so complete that there seemed no life to get away from.
John Galsworthy
[C]ourage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.
Samuel Johnson
How you perceive yourself is how others will see you.
Paul Arden
She remembered the conversation in the Library, as forgetting was the last thing a fully-trained Librarian should do. Memories were as important as books, and almost as important as proper indexing.
Genevieve Cogman
In fact, in recent years I have become more and more didactic about pubic hair - to the point where I now believe that there are only four things a grown, modern woman should have: a pair of yellow shoes (they unexpectedly go with everything), a friend who will come and post bail at 4 a.m., a fail-safe pie recipe, and a proper muff. A big, hairy minge. A lovely furry moof that looks - when she sits, naked - as if she has a marmoset sitting in her lap. A tame marmoset, that she can send of to pickpocket things, should she so need it - like that trained monkey in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Caitlin Moran
The mind is an empire unto itself.
Steven Redhead
When the anger is intense, the person with Asperger's syndrome may be in a 'blind rage' and unable to see the signals indicating that it would be appropriate to stop. Feelings of anger can also be in response in situations where we would expect other emotions. I have noted that sadness may be expressed as anger.
Tony Attwood
Stress can alter the expression of genes, which can affect the response to stress and so on. Human behavior is therefore unpredictable in the short term, but broadly predictable in the long term.
Matt Ridley
Justice requires that you should not place the burdens of one man on the shoulders of another man, even though he is better able to bear them. In plainer words, that you should not make one set of men pay for what is used by another set of men.
Auberon Herbert
One person cannot make up for the evils of a whole system and it is the system that is to blame - the system of narrowness and of pride, and of exclusiveness, and of no one doing anything for another, unless there is something to be gained in return.
Amy Dillwyn
Saying of the ProphetAccusationsAnyone reviling a brother for a sin will not himself die before committing it.
Idries Shah
At the same time, we may not as a culture be fond of old-fashioned supernaturalism, but we certainly like spirituality in whatever form we can get it. I suspect that if anyone other than Jesus (Krishna, say, or Buddha) were suddenly put forward as being due for a second coming, millions in our postsecular society would embrace such a thing uncritically, leaving Enlightenment rationalism huffing and puffing in the rear. We are a puzzled and confused generation, embracing any and every kind of nonrationalism that may offer us a spiritual shot in the arm while lapsing back into rationalism (in particular, the old modernist critiques) whenever we want to keep traditional or orthodox Christianity at bay.
N.T. Wright
Sometimes I almost pity them. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing, I am hardly human any more. I am the French Lieutenant’s Whore.
John Fowles
The process of applying Mindfulness Burnout Prevention (MBP) in the workplace or any environment has a much more far-reaching effect than simply accessing equanimity throughout the vicissitudes of life. Continuous learning helps us to stay youthful, sharpen our mental faculties and wire new neural connections in our brain (making us better equipped to accomplish); it is also a sign of humility.
Christopher Dines
Progress just means bad things happen faster.
Terry Pratchett
Victorian rigidities were such that ladies were not even allowed to blow out candles in mixed company, as that required them to pucker their lips suggestively. They could not say that they were going "to bed"--that planted too stimulating an image--but merely that they were "retiring." It became effectively impossible to discuss clothing in even a clinical sense without resort to euphemisms. Trousers became "nether integuments" or simply "inexpressibles" and underwear was "linen." Women could refer among themselves to petticoats or, in hushed tones, stockings, but could mention almost nothing else that brushed bare flesh.
Bill Bryson
Globally, democracies have also acted in ways that suggest an outright renunciation of their principles at home.
Nayef Al-Rodhan
Diana can read power levels,” Astrid said. “Did she ever…”Sam nodded. “She said the baby is a three bar. As a fetus. Who knows what it will be when it’s born. Or as it grows. Diana’s only, like, four or five months along. I should know exactly, but I forget. When she would talk about it I would kind of, you know.” He made a shivering move, like it all gave him the creeps.Astrid shook her head in disbelief. “Really. That’s the part of all this that makes you squirm: pregnancy.”“She made me touch her, you know, stomach. And she talked about her, um, her things.” He pointed at his chest and whispered, “Nipples.”“Yeah,” Astrid said dryly. “I could see where that would be devastating.
Michael Grant