Quotes by British Authors - Page 403

As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on thing and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down you cannot see something that is above you.
C.S. Lewis
...the government in Beijing continues to define itself as Marxist-Leninist, though 'Market-Leninist' would be rather more apt.
Francis Wheen
In view of this and other things, I demand forgiveness for being so obviously impressed with my own parents.
Beryl Markham
Success is never found. Failure is never fatal. Courage is the only thing.
Winston Churchill
How're we getting to King's Cross tomorrow, Dad?" asked Fred as they dug into a sumptuous pudding."The Ministry's providing a couple of cars," said Mr. Weasley.Everyone looked up at him."Why?" said Percy curiously."It's because of you, Perce," said George seriously. "And there'll be little flags on the hoods, with HB on them-""-for Humongous Bighead," said Fred.
J.K. Rowling
Worldly ease is a great foe to faith; it loosens the joints of holy valour, and snaps the sinews of sacred courage. The balloon never rises until the cords are cut; affliction doth this sharp service for believing souls.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist. So, for a time, if such a passion come to fruition, the man will get what he wants. He will get the moral support, the encouragement, the relief from the sense of loneliness, the assurance of his own worth. But these things pass away; inevitably they pass away as the shadows pass across sundials. It is sad, but it is so. The pages of the book will become familiar; the beautiful corner of the road will have been turned too many times. Well, this is the saddest story.
Ford Madox Ford
Maybe they were born of karma, their own or their parents', Zack thought; maybe the universe had a purpose for them, and they were what they were because the world needed them to be that way.
Jackie Trippier Holt
Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to believe in a certain way, and can't really get rid of it.
C.S. Lewis
I will admit that I wanted to shout for standing on the top of a scaffold in front of a good new wall always goes to my head. It is a sensation something between that of an angel let out of his cage into a new sky and a drunkard turned loose in a royal cellar.And after all, what nobler elevation could you find in this world than the scaffold of a wall painter? No admiral on the bridge of a new battleship designed by the old navy, could feel more pleased with himself than Gulley, on two planks, forty feet above dirt level, with his palette table beside him, his brush in his hand, and the draught blowing up his trousers; cleared for action.
Joyce Cary
It's the hardest thing in the world to go on being aware of someone else's pain.
Pat Barker
There is not a day or night but a doe offers her life for her kittens, or some honest captain of Owsla his life for his Chief Rabbit's. Sometimes it is taken, sometimes it is not. But there is no bargain, for here, what is, is what must be.
Richard Adams
She wasn’t religious. She didn’t believe in heaven or hell, only in ghosts, Ouija boards, tables which rapped and little inept voices speaking plaintively of flowers
Graham Greene
Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
Aldous Huxley
There were, however, a few exceptions.One was Norma Dodsworth, the poet, who had not unpleasantly drunk but had been sensible enough to pass out before any violent action proved necessary. He had been deposited, not very gently, on the lawn, where it was hoped that a hyena would give him a rude awakening. For all practical purposes he could, therefore, be regarded as absent.
Arthur C. Clarke
Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world I can't even finish my second apple pie.
Banksy
The greatest challenge on the Web in the twenty-first century is to connect with your target audience in a way that enriches both them and you.
David Amerland
Hatred bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Amanda Craig
Individually, the experience of most people was of accelerating impotence and incomprehension. They lived in a world of superstition. They relied on voodoo - charms, fetishes, and crystal balls whose caprices they were helpless to govern, yet without which the conduct of daily life came to a standstill. Faith that the computer would switch on one more time and do as it was asked had more a religious than a rational cast. When the screen went black, the gods were angry.
Lionel Shriver
Because sometimes there are problems bigger than this week’s end of the world and sometimes you just have to find the extraordinary in your ordinary life.
Patrick Ness
The gods hate those who plan badly, and help those with good friends, good swords, and good sense.
Joe Abercrombie
Why we do what do matters. When we lose our why, we lose our way. We inevitably get lost when we don't know why we are doing what we are doing.
Michael White
Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.
Jane Austen
He thought, Yeah. Yeah, non-smokers live seven years longer. Which seven will be subtracted by the god called Time? It won't be that convulsive, heart-bursting spell between twenty-eight and thirty-five. No. It'll be that really cool bit between eighty-six and ninety-three.
Martin Amis
What we decide to do in the face of adversity is perhaps the truest measure of character.
Ian Usher
There will be time, there will be timeTo prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;There will be time to murder and create,And time for all the works and days of handsThat lift and drop a question on your plate;Time for you and time for me,And time yet for a hundred indecisions,And for a hundred visions and revisions,Before the taking of a toast and tea.
T.S Eliot
Was it possible to find recompense, meaning, connection with others amidst the mess and the muddle ?
Elizabeth Buchan
It is the afternoon of my birthday, but still the morning of my life.
Simon Van Booy
The gruff murmur, irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes which had kept on assuring her, though she could not hear what was said (as she sat in the window which opened on the terrace), that the men were happily talking; this sound, which had lasted now half an hour and had taken its place soothingly in the scale of sounds pressing on top of her, such as the tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden bark now and then, "How's that? How's that?" of the children playing cricket, had ceased; so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, "I am guarding you––I am your support," but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow––this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror.
Virginia Woolf
Every client presents a practitioner with a novel and unique problem to solve. A therapist has to be a general problem-solver, and part of this expertise is grounded in an experimental style of reasoning originally developed for scientific purposes.
Richard S. Hallam
You will see by this that no man should be judged by another here in this life, for the good or evil he has done. Deeds may be properly judged, whether they are good or bad, but not men.
Clifton Wolters
He makes no friends who never made a foe.
Alfred Tennyson
When I kissed you the day I left, I swear to God you stripped me bare.
Scarlett Cole
Yet he was jealous, though he did not show it, For jealousy dislikes the world to know it.
George Gordon Byron
If you call upon the Gods and they answer, who is there to oppose or to challenge the integrity of your Path?
Andrew D. Chumbley
You're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you can change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you're dead, it's gone. Over. You've made what you've made, dreamed your dream, written your name. You may be buried here, you may even walk. But that potential is finished.
Neil Gaiman
There is violence in this supposedly tender heart of mine.
Julian Barnes
Books have a life. They breathe. When you write a book, it grows and changes. You learn from your characters after you create them. They come from you and you become them.
Chloe Thurlow
St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel.
Malcolm Muggeridge
When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to die without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which the young applaud the most insignificant improvements … while remaining heedless of the world’s barbarism. I don’t say things have got worse; I merely say the young wouldn’t notice if they had. The old times were good because then we were young, and ignorant of how ignorant the young can be.
Julian Barnes
When you see the truth for the first time, it is what people call a peak moment, or a moment of clarity. You get a larger percentage of what each moment of life actually contains; you are filled with life. Your mind is the gatekeeper of life, and sometimes it lets a little true life in, but most of the time it does not.Without the mind blocking life, you receive all of life, true life, and reflect it all back out.Seeing Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon for the first time is a peak moment for most people. Why does it make you feel so alive? Nothing really happens to you. Why doesn’t it feel as good the second time you see it? You are seeing the same thing. The reason is, your mind opens up when something is special.The truth is, every moment of life is special, and you can be completely open to life most of the time. You have to see the truth to see true life.
Michael Smith
If he trips he must be sustained. If he makes mistakes they must be covered. If he sleeps he must not be wantonly disturbed. If he is no good he must be pole-axed
Winston S. Churchill
In the forestlichen writhes and assembles itself into signs to light my path through the deep dark north shadow; and I emerge at last onto a hillside strewn with logogrammatic stones, and scramble away from spruce tops." in the poem "Beyond the Beacon" from Terra Affirmative.
Jay Woodman
Most business meetings involve one party elaborately suppressing a wish to shout at the other: 'just give us the money'.
Alain de Botton
Thought fitted thought; opinion met opinion: we coincided, in short, perfectly.
Charlotte Brontë
I, while the gods laugh, the world's vortex am;Maelström of passions in that hidden seaWhose waves of all-time lap the coasts of me;And in small compass the dark waters cram.
Mervyn Peake
Mr. Carter might have remembered, too—though he did not—that the Bible speaks of wicked men who prosper in the world and increase in riches; and of those who are poor in this world, but rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which God has promised to them that love Him. And he might have learned from this that his prosperity was no sure proof that God was pleased with him.
George E. Sargent
…”The Emersons who were at Florence, do you mean? No, I don’t suppose it will prove to be them. It is probably a long cry from them to friends of Mr. Vyse’s. Oh, Mrs. Honeychurch, the oddest people! The queerest people! For our part we liked them, didn’t we?” He appealed to Lucy. “There was a great scene over some violets. They picked violets and filled all the vases in the room of these very Miss Alans who have failed to come to Cissie Villa. Poor little ladies! So shocked and so pleased. It used to be one of Miss Catharine’s great stories. ‘My dear sister loves flowers,’ it began. They found the whole room a mass of blue — vases and jugs — and the story ends with ‘So ungentlemanly and yet so beautiful.’ It is all very difficult. Yes, I always connect those Florentine Emersons with violets.”…
E.M. Forster
To enter a theatre for a performance is to be inducted into a magical space, to be ushered into the sacred arena of the imagination.
Simon Callow
Courage is the greatest of all the virtues. Because if you haven't courage you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others.
Samuel Johnson
Once I saw Graham - wholly unconscious of her proximity - push her with his restless foot. She receded an inch or two. A minute after one little hand stole out from beneath her face, to which it had been pressed, and softly caressed the heedless foot.
Charlotte Brontë
Who's got a mirror?” I ask. Spider shrugs at me. “We're all fellas. Why would any of us have mirrors?”“I've got a mirror!” Brandon declares happily, digging a compact out of his pocket. No-one is surprised.
Melanie Tushmore
I dropped my gardening tools, threw my bicycle over a hedge and went in search of fortunes laid beneath the hangman’s noose.
Fennel Hudson
There! Now we're friends!" declared the minx. "Say you're sorry about my sister -""I am desolated!""That's a good boy!
Agatha Christie
Endings bring new beginnings. Love has many truths. And knights come in all colours.
Dianna Hardy
It was pleasant - and the sense of otherness was nice, that there were two people involved in this process, that we were each giving something to the other.
William Boyd
I'm not an atheist,because I believe that I'm god.
Anthony T.Hincks
They tell us to count our blessings whilst they count the coffers
Dean Cavanagh
Life is all about balance, without which the seeds of chaos grow.
Steven Redhead
Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings.
Gerald Durrell