Quotes by British Authors - Page 47

Achieving your heart’s desire is the key to living a life of bliss, bring your heart alive with a passion for living.
Steven Redhead
Without the will or desire to achieve one is like flotsam on the oceans of time.
Steven Redhead
But death has taken root inside you and you know it will grow, like a cancer with a voice, from now until the day it consumes you whole.
Sharon Bolton
Jesus was a penniless teacher who wandered about the dusty sun-bit country of Judea, living upon casual gifts of food; yet he is always represented clean, combed, and sleek, in spotless raiment, erect, and with something motionless about him as though he was gliding through the air. This alone has made him unreal and incredible to many people who cannot distinguish the core of the story from the ornamental and unwise additions of the unintelligently devout.
H.G.Wells
...and said grace in Welsh. It was all rolling, thundering language.
Diana Wynne Jones
Sometimes oppurtunities float right past your nose. Work hard, apply yourself, and be ready. When an opportunity comes you can grab it.
Julie Andrews Edwards
I'll do anything reasonable, but I won't be intimidated and I won't grovel.
Lynne Graham
I like the confusion you get between science and religion … that’s where belief lies and art as well.
Damien Hirst
We are not interested in those stupid crimes you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about.
George Orwell
Secrets had an immense attraction to him, because he never could keep one, and he enjoyed the sort of unhallowed thrill he experienced when he went and told another animal, after having faithfully promised not to.
Kenneth Grahame
Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.
Salman Rushdie
I've decided that I'm not going to try to squeeze myself into a friendship that hurts me anymore. I'm going to let her go and just be friends with people who make me feel good about myself.
Zoe Sugg
Tut tut child said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral if only you can find it."
Lewis Carroll
To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it.
Charlie Chaplin
Mindfulness & Meditation help focus on the moment while at the same time knowing we cannot capture that moment, we are in a flow of moments we let flow. We can watch moments in detail without being attached to them. Non-attachment to past & future stems from this practice. Worry about past or future is wasted energy, however we can observe the past & learn from it without agonising over it & trust ourselves to handle the future better. We can celebrate the opportunity to grow as we gain understanding from observation & experience. We can watch ourselves & avoid being caught up in over-reactions. "I am loved, right now, in this moment, I love, and am part of love itself. I am aware of myself at every level - the mental slowing gracefully to sense the spiritual within & all around, and the physical being still, or moving. I tune in to the flow of life in my body & the flow of life everywhere. I circulate love with each breath - from without to within & from within to all around.
Jay Woodman
They were happier now than they would ever be again. A tenpenny tea set made Cam happy for days. She heard them stamping and crowing on the floor above her head the moment they woke. They came bustling along the passage. Then the door sprang open and in they came, fresh as roses, staring, wide awake, as if this coming into the dining-room after was a positive event to them, and so on, with one thing after another, all day long, until she went up to say good-night to them, and found them netted in their cots like birds among cherries and raspberries, still making up stories about some little bit of rubbish-–something they heard, something they had picked up in the garden. They had all their little treasures. . . And so she went down and said to her husband, Why must they grow up and lose it all? Never will they be so happy again. And he was angry. Why take such a gloomy view of life? he said. It is not sensible. For it was odd; and he believed it to be true; that with all his gloom and desperation he was happier, more hopeful on the whole, than she was. Less exposed to human worries––perhaps that was it. He had always his work to fall back on.
Virginia Woolf
Respect yourself enough to let go of someone who doesn’t see your worth.
Robert Tew
Ana, honey, you've always had a tendency to overanalyse everything. Go with your gut.
E.L. James
Life took longer to reassemble than it did to blow apart, but that didn't mean it wouldn't be lovely, providing that one remembered to go for country walks, and to tune the wireless to music.
Chris Cleave
Procrastination is the thief of time.
Edward Young
He continued to attack the gate. His arm started to ache. The hammer was designed for neither brute nor force. "Are you all right up there?" asked Eleanor. "Want me to go see if I can find a small child to give you a lift?" "Maybe if we swapped positions and you condescended at the gate, we'd get through faster?
Gary Meehan
We live in an epoch in which the solid ground of our preconceived ideas shakes daily under our certain feet.
Barbara Ward
The beautiful is powerless but always exceeds what frames it, and what always frames it is discourse.
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
Christmas is a time for families.
Dorothy Koomson
They inhabited a lost world of splendour and brutality, a world dominated by religious change, in which there were few saints.
Alison Weir
Uh, I really didn't mean to disturb you.''I sincerely hope that is untrue. If you arrived here with no objective capable of disturbing me then you arrived with no objective at all, and you will have succeeded in disturbing me without purpose.
Jonathan Renshaw
To Sara's practised eye, this latest episode looked something like a broken heart, even if she'd never seen the look on him before. Or even imagined it happening. She wondered if he'd noticed yet.
Manna Francis
As it turned out, almost every notion I had on my 13th birthday about my future turned out to be a total waste of my time. When I thought of myself as an adult, all I could imagine was someone thin, and smooth, and calm, to whom things... happened. Some kind of souped-up princess with a credit card. I didn't have any notion about self-development, or following my interests, or learning big life lessons, or, most important, finding out what I was good at and trying to earn a living from it. I presumed that these were all things that some grown-ups would come along and basically tell me what to do about at some point, and that I really shouldn't worry about them. I didn't worry about what I was going to do. What I did worry about, and thought I should work hard at, was what I should be, instead. I thought all of my efforts should be concentrated on being fabulous, rather than doing fabulous things.
Caitlin Moran
The very power of [textbook writers] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.
C.S. Lewis
Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.
Winston S. Churchill
We are not going to reduce energy capture unless catastrophe forces us to—which means that the only way to avoid running out of resources, poisoning the planet, or both, will be by tapping into renewable, clean power.
Ian Morris
On the Ridgeway path, aged nine or ten, was where for the first time I realized the power a person might feel by aligning themselves to deep history. Only much later did I understand these intimations of history had their own, darker, history. The chalk country-cult rested on a presumption of organic connections to a landscape, a sense of belonging sanctified through an appeal to your own imagined lineage. That chalk downloads held their national, as well as natural, histories. And it was much later, too, that I realized that these myths hurt. That they work to wipe away other cultures, other histories, other ways of loving, working and being in a landscape. How they tiptoe towards darkness.
Helen Macdonald
The living self has one purpose only: to come into its own fullness of being.
D.H. Lawrence
The cells smell is a great feature of French prisons. Ours in No.44 was one of those fine broad-shouldered up and coming young smells, which stand on both feet and look the world in the eye. We became very fond and proud of it.
P.G. Wodehouse
We're not obsessed by anything, you see," insisted Ford."...""And that's the deciding factor. We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win.""I care about lots of things," said Slartibartfast, his voice trembling partly with annoyance, but partly also with uncertainty."Such as?""Well," said the old man, "life, the Universe. Everything, really. Fjords.""Would you die for them?""Fjords?" blinked Slartibartfast in surprise. "No.""Well then.""Wouldn't see the point, to be honest.
Douglas Adams
Communication is the breath or death of any relationship
Rasheed Ogunlaru
An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one.
E.M. Forster
We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.
Anthony Burgess
His constant references to the ancient world have the effect of giving ordinary soldiers a sense of their lives.
Andrew Roberts
With every mistake, we must surely be learning.
George Harrison
When someone is sleep-Tweeting the sexual thoughts you’re currently having about them while you’re having sex with someone else, miles away, it’s kind of too late.
Stefan Mohamed
Sometimes survival is the worst alternative there is
Joanne Harris
True lovers may never know what love means. A man may love a woman out of his reach. She does not know he loves her, and he will never speak of it.
Rosalind Miles
But great tragedy is universal
Salman Rushdie
Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of Italy. Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world.
G.K. Chesterton
Even the simplest poemMay destroy your immunity to human emotions.All poems must carry a Government warning. WordsCan seriously affect your heart.
Elma Mitchell
In the modern world we are in a paradoxical situation; because although in theory man knows that he can extend his attention to something and then remove it, he very often does not do so. In many areas he does not look at something and then detach from it, and look at something else.Once he has found something to interest himself in, he cannot detach himself from it efficiently, and therefore he cannot be objective. Note that, in most if not all languages, we have words like 'objectivity' which leads people to imagine that they have it, or can easily use it. That is equivalent (in reality if not in theory) to saying 'I know the word “gold”, so I am rich.
Idries Shah
Religion isn't the cause of wars, it's the excuse.
Jasper Fforde
Mere lack of evidence, of course, is no reason to denounce a theory. Look at intelligent design. The fact that it is bollocks hasn’t stopped a good many people from believing in it. Darwinism itself is only supported by tons of evidence, which is a clear indication that Darwin didn’t write his books himself.
Eric Idle
To his dog every man is Napoleon hence the constant popularity of dogs.
Aldous Huxley
When I'm out of politics I'm going to run a business, it'll be called rent-a-spine
Margaret Thatcher
Friendship is love without wings.
George Gordon Byron
The clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop
Ben Aaronovitch
The more I think about myself, the more I'm persuaded that, as a person, I really don't exist. That is one of the reasons why I can't believe in any orthodox religion: I cannot believe in my own soul. No, I am a chemical compound, conditioned by environment and education. My "character" is simply a repertoire of acquired tricks, my conversation a repertoire of adaptations and echoes, my "feelings" are dictated by purely physical, external stimuli.
Christopher Isherwood
He couldn't tell Zeke how they would be tomorrow, because he didn't know that answer yesterday, did he?
Clare London
But he doesn't see what's so great about leaving your mark on things. You have a life and then it ends and you're dead. Living it is the point, not proving to other people that you were there. The whole thing is really just water pouring down a plughole, but that's absolutely fine. Standing water gets stagnant.
M.R. Carey
Without courage, our generation is doomed to another decade of political disenfranchisement and shit music.
Laurie Penny
There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul.
Arnold Bennett
If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.
C.S. Lewis
The table next to the sink is for flashcards. I saw a Monty Python skit called, "every sperm is sacred," and it gave me the idea that, "every piss is sacred." Meaning, WHY NOT LOOK AT FLASHCARDS WHILE VOIDING?
Peter Rogers