Quotes by British Authors - Page 361

To bind one free man with love is better than to release a thousand slaves.
Idries Shah
How can trade be bad if you don’t make moneyeven when it’s good?” inquired Gleed, reasonablyapplying the information Harrison had given him.Jeff’s big moon eyes went over him slowly thenturned to Harrison. “So he’s another bum off yourboat, eh? What’s he talking about?”“Money,” explained Harrison. “It’s stuff we use tosimplify trade. It’s printed stuff, like documentaryobs of various sizes.”“That tells me a lot,” Jeff Baines observed. “Ittells a crowd that has to make a printed record ofevery ob is not to be trusted — because they don’teven trust each other.
Eric Frank Russell
Gimmerton chapel bells were still ringing and the full, mellow flow of the beck in the valley came soothingly on the ear. It was a sweet substitute for the yet absent murmur of the summer foliage, which drowned that music about the Grange when the trees were in leaf.
Emily Brontë
Situations spin out of control because care was not taken to carefully manage reality through desires.
Steven Redhead
Self-government is in inverse ratio to numbers. The larger the constituency, the less the value of any par­ticular vote. When he is merely one of millions, the individual elector feels himself to be impotent, a neg­ligible quantity. The candidates he has voted into office are far away, at the top of the pyramid of power. Theoretically they are the servants of the people; but in fact it is the servants who give orders and the peo­ple, far off at the base of the great pyramid, who must obey.
Aldous Huxley
I had wanted to compromise with Fate: to escape occasional great agonies by submitting to a whole life of privation and small pains.
Charlotte Brontë
Seen from the point of view of a lie, the truth is often touted as radical.
Mango Wodzak
Senior Republicans certainly expected the president to come clean over Miss Lewinsky.
Bridget Kendall
A picture may tell a thousand words but it doesn't tell a story
Thomas Wright
I want an Oompa-Loompa!' screamed Veruca.
Roald Dahl
Only after seeing the winter, do you comprehend the richness of summer. This was a big theme, and one I could confidently do: the infinite variety of nature.
Martin Gayford
Strength of character isn't always about how much you can handle before you break, it's also about how much you can handle after you've broken.
Robert Tew
how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude--utter solitude without a policeman--by the way of silence--utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness
Joseph Conrad
One must not make too much of anything in life, good or bad.
Joseph Conrad
Oh for a book and a shady nook,Either indoors or out,with the green leaves whispering overhead,or the street cries all about.Where I may read at all my easeboth of the new and old,For a jolly good book whereon to lookis better to me than gold
John Wilson
The world does not consist of 100 percent Christians and 100 percent non-Christians. There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves so.
C.S. Lewis
If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.
John Brunner
There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age. I missed it coming and going.
J.B. Priestley
Here is the day for the man, where is the man for the day?
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Rites–of–passage stories…were cherished in pre–literate societies not only for their entertainment value, but also as mythic tools to prepare young men and women for life’s ordeals. A wealth of such stories can be found marking each major transition in the human life cycle: puberty, marriage, childbirth, menopause, death. Other rites–of–passage, less predictable but equally transformative, include times of sudden change and calamity such as illness and injury, the loss of one’s home, the death of a loved one, etc. These are the times when we wake, like Dante, to find ourselves in a deep, dark wood — an image that in Jungian psychology represents an inward journey. Rites–of–passage tales point to the hidden roads that lead out of the dark again — and remind us that at the end of the journey we’re not the same person as when we started. Ascending from the Netherworld (that grey landscape of illness, grief, depression, or despair), we are ‘twice–born’ in our return to life, carrying seeds — new wisdom, ideas, creativity and fecundity of spirit.
Terri Windling
Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot readThe hunter's waking thoughts.
W.H. Auden
(On the communist regime of Ceaușescu)"Romania," said Eugene, "was twenty million people living inside the imagination of a madman.
Jon Ronson
The longer one lives, the more mysterious life seems.
Francis Brett Young
Oh, you mysterious girls, when you are fifty-two we shall find you out; you must come into the open then. If the mouth has fallen sourly yours the blame: all the meanness your youth concealed have been gathering in your face. But the pretty thoughts and sweet ways and dear, forgotten kindnesses linger there also, to bloom in your twilight like evening primroses.
J.M. Barrie
We call bad one who rejects the fruit he is given for the fruit he is expecting or the fruit he was given last time.
C.S. Lewis
Granddad once told me that to truly love this life, you need to know its darkest corners. But if you can bring a bit of sunshine to the sunless, it can only be for the good. I mean, what else are we really here for on this earth? Think about it some day, when the spring mornings look so golden and green.
Gareth Thompson
What do you want to be, free or happy? How about if they really are mutually exclusive options? What is freedom anyway? How does humanity govern itself when each person can have anything they want? How does humanity govern itself when nothing is natural?
Jo Walton
Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.
Alan Moore
Honour and I would have to create our world, live by our own rules. My family wasn't ready for her just yet. I didn't know if they ever would be.
Ruth Ahmed
It will be the kiss by which all others in your life will be judged... and found wanting.
Anthony Hopkins
Sin/ alienation is psychological disease which if unhealed can lead to the living hell of lost hopes and blighted lives.
Susan Howatch
With a feeling of despondency so intense that it was almost pleasurable, he got out his guitar.So this was to be his condition now.What was he but a fragment of broken churned-uphumanity washed up on this faraway shore? This was where his journey had brought him.... There mus be a song in this...
Marina Lewycka
To obtain victory by any means and with any weapon.
Chris Bradford
This was the winter of 2008/9. Work was ongoing to reinstate a tram system in the city. A lot of people couldn’t see the point of trams and many more disliked the disruption. Streets were closed off. There was almost a sense of ‘apartheid’ as the roadworks made it difficult to move from New Town to Old Town and vice versa. Added to which, the weather was fairly grim. And the banks looked ready to implode.
Ian Rankin
Who that has ever visited the borders of this classic sea, has not felt at the first sight of its waters a glow of reverent rapture akin to devotion, and an instinctive sensation of thanksgiving at being permitted to stand before these hallowed waves? All that concerns the Mediterranean is of the deepest interest to civilized man, for the history of its progress is the history of the development of the world; the memory of the great men who have lived and died around its banks; the recollection of the undying works that have come thence to delight us for ever; the story of patient research and brilliant discoveries connected with every physical phenomenon presented by its waves and currents, and with every order of creatures dwelling in and around its waters. The science of the Mediterranean is the epitome of the science of the world.
Edward Forbes
She had argued for a broad interpretation, which imposed a duty to answer questions truthfully, and not to hide facts which could give a different complexion to a matter, but on subsequent thought she had revised her position.Although she still believed that one should be frank in answers to questions, this duty arose only where there was an obligation, based on a reasonable expectation, to make a full disclosure. There was no duty to reveal everything in response to a casual question by one who had no right to the information.
Alexander McCall Smith
I was sixteen, and I honestly believed that I was due a love story.
Sara Barnard
Writers strive for the impossible: perfection. Even the universe is flawed.
Chloe Thurlow
A man walked across the moors from Razorback to Lancre town without seeing a single marshlight, head-less dog, strolling tree, ghostly coach or comet, and had to be taken in by a tavern and given a drink to unsteady his nerves.
Terry Pratchett
Censorship: It allows you not to think for yourself.
Anthony T.Hincks
Where law ends there tyranny begins.
William Pitt
If you had to relive your life exactly as it was – same successes and failures, same happiness, same miseries, same mixture of comedy and tragedy – would you want to? Was it worth it?
Gavin Extence
Mr. McGregor's a nasty piece of work, isn't he? Quite the Darth Vader of children's literature.
Jasper Fforde
It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.
Virginia Woolf
You are ass and I like class. I like diamonds, you are a glass. You brown mouse, I like black cats. You boy pussy but i like tom cats. Just because you got the dance, don't think you stand a fucking chance.
Salman Rushdie
Faith is a state of openness or trust.To have faith is like when you trust yourself to the water. You don’t grab hold of the water when you swim, because if you do you will become stiff and tight in the water, and sink. You have to relax, and the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging, and holding on.In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
Alan W. Watts
The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche.
David Deutsch
In order to know your enemy, you must become your enemy.
Chris Bradford
We are now at risk of having a zombie democracy roaming around a one-party state.
Jeremy Corbyn
It’s not the quality of the answers that changes our lives, it’s the quality of the question
Steven Aitchison
It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.
George Eliot
An exceedingly well-informed report,' said the General. 'You have given yourself the trouble to go into matters thoroughly, I see. That is one of the secrets of success in life.
Anthony Powell
A sensible man may fear certain possibilities, but don’t let fear turn possibility into certainty.
Mark Lawrence
Your trials and difficulties are a golden opportunity to illustrate your faith in God.
Elizabeth George
When I hear a man say that his childhood was the happiest time of his life, I think (puff) my friend, you have had a pretty poor life.
Winston S. Churchill
Every new dayOur children's joy is as fresh as roses,Even the birds chatter at dawn.
Scott Hastie
My life isn’t theories and formulae. It’s part instinct, part common sense. Logic is as good a word as any, and I’ve absorbed what logic I have from everything and everyone… from my mother, from training as a ballet dancer, from Vogue magazine, from the laws of life and health and nature.
Audrey Hepburn
O prejudice, prejudice, prejudice, how many hast thou destroyed! Men who might have been wise have remained fools because they thought they were wise. Many judge what the gospel ought to be, but do not actually enquire as to what it is. They do not come to the Bible to obtain their views of religion, but they open that Book to find texts to suit the opinions which they bring to it. They are not open to the honest force of truth, and therefore are not saved by it.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
* *Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for.*Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.
George Orwell
If we do not touch the heart, we will soon weary the ear.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon