Quotes by British Authors - Page 306

You see, the bodily resurrection of Jesus isn't a take-it-or-leave-it thing, as though some Christians are welcome to believe it and others are welcome not to believe it. Take it away, and the whole picture is totally different. Take it away, and Karl Marx was probably right to accuse Christianity of ignoring the problems of the material world. Take it away, and Sigmund Freud was probably right to say that Christianity is a wish-fulfillment religion. Take it away, and Friedrich Nietzsche was probably right to say that Christianity was a religion for wimps. Put it back, and you have a faith that can take on the postmodern world that looks to Marx, Freud and Nietzsche as its prophets, and you can beat them at their own game with the Easter news that the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
N.T. Wright
We are adjured not to burn the candle at both ends.But how many people have verified that physically possible?
Idries Shah
The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don't belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional.
Virginia Woolf
Art is the expression of an enormous preference.
Wyndham Lewis
You have been the great green adventure of my life. Without you my days would be unlit.
Katherine Rundell
Memory of all the powers of the mind is the most delicate and frail.
Ben Jonson
Are you using me simply as a vulgar tool? Don't you care for me the least little bit? Let me suggest that for a girl in your-your ambiguous position, you are too proud, by several shades. Don't go back to Roger in a hurry! You're not the unspotted maiden you were but two short days ago. Who am I, what am I, to the people whose opinion you care for? A very low fellow, madam; and yet with me you've gone far to cast your lot. If you're not prepared to do more, you should have done less. Nora, Nora," he went on, breaking into a vein none the less revolting for being more ardent, "I confess I don't understand you! But the more you puzzle me the more you fascinate me; and the less you like me the more I love you. What has there been between you and Lawrence? Hang me if I can understand! Are you an angel of purity, or are you the most audacious of flirts?
Henry James
Hell is just a frame of mind.
Christopher Marlowe
Rosamond, accustomed from her childhood to an extravagant household, thought that good housekeeping consisted simply in ordering the best of everything––nothing else 'answered;' and Lydgate supposed that 'if things were done at all, they must be done properly'–he did not see how they were to live otherwise. If each head of household expenditure had been mentioned to him beforehand, he would have probably observed that 'it could hardly come to much,' and if any one had suggested a saving on a particular article–for example, the substitution of cheap fish for dear–it would have appeared to him simply a penny-wise, mean notion.
George Eliot
So I am not at all interested in this whole 'she-shed' thing, I love my 'man-cave' - after all, cave is much more sturdy than a shed and there is always a chance that it's the entrance to Batman's secret hideout.
C.S. Woolley
There is no physician like Him, none can save as He can; we love Him, and He loves us, and therefore we put ourselves into His hands, accept whatever he prescribes, and do whatever He bids.We feel that nothing can be wrongly ordered while He is the director of our affairs; for He loves us too well to let us perish, or suffer a single needless pang
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
It is strange the way that someone who wants to find you guilty can start to make you believe in your own guilt, even when you know you are innocent. I was afraid I would condemn myself my mistake.
S.J. Parris
Lenin was always prone to overestimate the physical danger to himself: in this respect he was something of a coward.
Orlando Figes
If Mr. Thornton was a fool in the morning, as he assured himself at least twenty times he was, he did not grow much wiser in that afternoon. All that he gained in return for his sixpenny omnibus ride, was a more vivid conviction that there never was, never could be, any one like Margaret; that she did not love him and never would; but that she — no! nor the whole world — should never hinder him from loving her.
Elizabeth Gaskell
Time present and time pastAre both perhaps present in time futureAnd time future contained in time past.
T.S Eliot
Basil Stag Hare tut-tutted severely as he remarked to Ambrose Spike, 'Tch, tch. Dreadful table manners. Just look at those three wallahs, kicking up a hullaballoo like that! Eating's a serious business.
Brian Jacques
For it is a choice, I think, to close the heart, just as it is a choice to open it. It is a choice to look at what distresses you, and a choice to shut your eyes. It is a choice to hold tight your pain, or else let it slip your grasp, set it free to make its mark upon the world.
Beth Underdown
The most convincing proof of the conversion of heat into living force [vis viva] has been derived from my experiments with the electro-magnetic engine, a machine composed of magnets and bars of iron set in motion by an electrical battery. I have proved by actual experiment that, in exact proportion to the force with which this machine works, heat is abstracted from the electrical battery. You see, therefore, that living force may be converted into heat, and that heat may be converted into living force, or its equivalent attraction through space.
James Prescott Joule
All the hungers we have for love, for union, for happiness are given by God to lead us to him. The difference between a saint and the greatest sinner is where they go to satisfy that hunger.
Christopher West
She had the experience to suffer with discretion.
John le Carré
But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything.
Virginia Woolf
Learn the techniques to open the Power of Your Heart, giving access to the infinite potential possibilities that truly exist for you.
Steven Redhead
If we make our own history, if we tell stories that bring us together, we'll be stronger. It'll give us something to believe in. The sickos can't do that – they're no better than animals – but we can. Every battle we win we have to tell the story over and over, so that we can win more battles. People love stories. They've told stories since even before they could write. Myths and legends, stories of heroes and villains, gods and monsters. Real things happened, the story got told and then the stories became legends. That's what we've got to do – tell our own heroic stories.
Charlie Higson
As a rule from what I've observed the American Captain of Industry doesn't do anything out of business hours. When he has put the cat out and locked up the office for the night he just relapses into a state of coma from which he emerges only to start being a Captain of Industry again.
P.G. Wodehouse
And then this whole deal of new gods, old gods," said his friend. "You ask me, I welcome new gods. Bring the on. The god of guns. The god of bombs. All the gods of ignorance and intolerance, of self-righteousness, idiocy and blame. All the stuff they try and land me with. Take a lot of the weight off my shoulders.
Neil Gaiman
He has returned from Italy a greater bore than ever he bores on architecture painting statuary and music.
Sydney Smith
Conception my boy fundamental brainwork is what makes the difference in all art.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
I am a terrible judge of character' "I don't think so. You just need to take note of FACTS from the outset, not feelings.
Freya North
What freedom means, is being allowed to sing in my bath as loudly as will not interfere with my neighbour's freedom to sing a different tune in his.
Tom Stoppard
Live simply. Deepest joy is like a flower....beautiful in essence.
Tony Samara
The colour of the water seems to be the colour of the glass into which it has been poured
Idries Shah
I'm here to tell you that if you get broken, it's possible to put yourself back together. I'm here to tell you that if you get lost, it's possible that a light will come, dancing, on the horizon, to lead you home.
Nick Lake
Listen to the sadness,the echoes in my mind,the place where I usually hide,but now I cannot find.Why had it happened?What had I done?Where was I going?Now I'm on the run.Hiding from the echoes,the pounding in my ears,the beatings getting louder,it isn't death, I fear!
Anthony T.Hincks
What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for the choice? They may have been forgotten. Did one know what one was choosing? Certainly not.
Iris Murdoch
Don't stop until you get enough.
Michael James Jackson
Thank God I have the seeing eye, that is to say, as I lie in bed I can walk step by step on the fells and rough land seeing every stone and flower and patch of bog and cotton pass where my old legs will never take me again.
Beatrix Potter
After a night of drinking, she would be a pale, starling-sized creature, but now, in this place, she is moonlight in heels.
Claire North
Sweetest smile is made saddest tear-drop!
Edwin Arnold
Most of the basic truths of life sound absurd at first hearing.
Elizabeth Goudge
Time has been given to us as a sacred covenant, that if wasted will haunt us throughout eternity, in the form of regret
Steven Redhead
Sarcasm is one of the many services I offer to people who ask stupid questions!
Habeeb Akande
Ah, music, a magic beyond all we do here.
J.K. Rowling
There are those who dance the notes and those who dance the music.
Eva Ibbotson
Walk free from the long shadows cast by small people.
Fennel Hudson
God is just, and our lots are well portioned out by Him, although none, but He knows the bitterness of our souls.
Elizabeth Gaskell
As Darwin said by keeping women at home their achievements were paltry compared to men's which proved women were biologically inferior. And he should know because he was a Genius. You probably learned about him at school.
Jacky Fleming
. . to cook well and with imagination you have to be in a cheerful and contented frame of mind, and thus inclined to be generous.
Alice Thomas Ellis
Please hear me, you are not alone on this planet hurtling through space, solitude is an illusion, come let me help you, rise up, walk forward, walk tall, walk straight, let nothing stop you.
Danny Scheinmann
The illusion of free will is so strong in my mind that I can't get away from it, but I believe it is only an illusion. But it is an illusion which is one of the strongest motives of my actions. Before I do anything I feel that I have a choice, and that influences what I do; but afterwards, when the thing is done, I believe it was inevitable from all eternity.''What do you deduce from that?''Why merely the futility of regret. It's no good crying over spilt milk, because all the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.
W Somerset Maugham
The two of us in that room. No past, no future. All intense deep that-time-only. A feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face.
John Fowles
The future is only the past again entered through another gate.
Arthur Wing Pinero
...hoping that he might peek through a gap in the fance and see that Patch was really a big softy, all bark and no bite, or, as they sometimes say in England, "All mouth and no trousers"!
Nick Trout
First, people were not thinking about what they were doing 47 per cent of the time. Second, people were unhappier when their minds were wandering than they were not. And third, what people were thinking was a better predictor of their happiness than what they were doing.
David Michie
What could be more intimate than dying with someone?
Sarah Lotz
Do you realize why is it I'm so driven to operate within the Establishment? It's vengeance. 'Hope I die before I get old' is something I still have to live with, but not for the reason many people think. I have to be very, very vigilant not to become one of those people I despised.
Pete Townshend
Faith is a private matter, usually held deep within a person, quiet, impossible to recognise or understand, if you have no faith yourself
Jennifer Worth
If four of you are playing hide and seek you'll only ever find the other three. For you are already right here. So what on earth is it that you're looking for? You are the very thing that you seek.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
The commencement of all labor consisted in the preparation of his own soul.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Although he too was heading to work, Shahid was glad he wasn't dragging himself off to some office job. Shahid's view: anybody who had to wear a suit to work died a little inside, every day.
John Lanchester
When you set out, you were four. Six with friends who could not stay behind. Now you are one.
Erin Hunter