Quotes by British Authors - Page 476

Deep down in all of us there is a tendency to want to prove ourselves, to base our worth on what we do.
Tim Chester
Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?
John Fowles
When the Church tries to embody the rule of God in the forms of earthly power it may achieve that power, but it is no longer a sign of the kingdom.
Lesslie Newbigin
One of these days you who are now a 'babe' in Christ shall be a 'father' in the church. Hope for this great thing; but hope for it as a gift of grace, and not as the wages of work, or as the product of your own energy.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
[Men] prefer the foolish belief and the passions of the earth [to the enlightenment of their souls]. They believe the absurd and shrink from the truth.""No, they do not. They are afraid, that is all. And they must remain on earth until they come to the way of leaving it.""And how do they leave? How is the ascent made? Must one learn virtue?"Here she laughs. "You have read too much, and learned too little. Virtue is a road, not a destination. Man cannot be virtuous. Understanding is the goal. When that is achieved, the soul can take wing.
Iain Pears
I thought upon the way in which we'd always shared each other's happiness, believing it would make the moment burn brighter and longer, but sadness can be shared too, perhaps sharing makes is burn briefer and less bright.
Tom Rob Smith
Maladict had hallucinations, but Wazzer had a certainty you could bend steel around. It was the opposite of a hallucination, somehow. It was as if she could see what was real and you couldn't.
Terry Pratchett
Dreams have always expanded our understanding of reality by challenging our boundaries of the real, the possible.
Henry Reed
Words are too awful an instrument for good and evil to be trifled with: they hold above all other external powers a dominion over thoughts. If words be not (recurring to a metaphor before used) an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments, read of in the stories of superstitious times, which had power to consume and to alienate from his right mind the victim who put them on. Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve.
William Wordsworth
Love lives on propinquity but dies on contact.
Thomas Hardy
There are enough cowards in the world without killing a brave creature for so little reason.
Brian Jacques
When they ask me to become president of the United States I'm going to say, "Except for Washington D.C.
Len Deighton
There's no luck in business. There's only drive, determination, and more drive.
Sophie Kinsella
Just outside Dover we stopped at an inn and I snatched a taste of dainty fried fish named smelts, and some herrings served with their tails in their mouths. Afterwards, me and Mr Loveday went out to take a view of the ocean. The wind was blowing so strong it whistled through my teeth and the sea was horrible; a vast plain of water ceaselessly moiling like a simmering pot. At last my head cold had cleared enough to taste the sea on my tongue; it had a strange salted vegetable tang.
Martine Bailey
You are young," said my father. "You won't get any younger even if you clean your teeth twice a day.""You'll get older," said my mother, "that's what happens.""Then what happens?""You won't be able to find the treasure.""Will I be too old to look for it?""No, but you'll be looking in the wrong place.
Jeanette Winterson
The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.
Thomas Hardy
God has already provided all you need to live this one day His way!
Elizabeth George
Amidst the vicissitudes of the earth's surface, species cannot be immortal, but must perish, one after another, like the individuals which compose them. There is no possibility of escaping from this conclusion.
Charles Lyell
And anyway who the devil should I want to murder?""That would be a very good question," said Miss Marple. "I have not yet had the pleasure of sufficient conversation with you to evolve a theory as to that."Mr. Rafter's smile broadened."Conversations with you might be dangerous," he said."Conversations are always dangerous, if you have something to hide," said Miss Marple.
Agatha Christie
It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify. dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question.
John Stuart Mill
You can't have occupation and human rights.
Christopher Hitchens
She’s the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She’s the self-made girl!(…)Well, to begin with, the self-made girl’s a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she isn’t self-made at all. We all help to make her, we take such an interest in her.
Henry James
Did she ever feel nostalgia for any of her girlhood dreams? But life was made up of a succession of dreams, some few to be realized, most to be set aside as time went on, one or two to persist for a lifetime. It was knowing when to abandon a dream, perhaps, that mattered and distinguished the successful people in life from the sad, embittered persons who never moved on from the first of life's great disappointments. Or from the airy dreamers who never really lived life at all.
Mary Balogh
Upon seeing the third and final table I realized that most of the people listed would most likely be dead, or come out of these qualifying races with severed limbs of as Revaarn liked to say 'Loose a limb no problem, it'll be amputated and replaced with a robotic one.
Charon Lloyd-Roberts
I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject.
Jeanette Winterson
Consider your own place in the universal oneness of which we are all a part, from which we all arise, and to which we all return.
David Fontana
Anyone who calls you "little lady" has already excluded you from the set of people worth listening to.
Neil Gaiman
Only the Gods are real.
Neil Gaiman
Here is a minute. It may be my love is dead, but here is a minute to kneel over the grave and pray by it.
William Makepeace Thackeray
As for future life every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.
Charles Darwin
There comes a moment in all travel when you know that you have really started. It may be weeks before you start or weeks after you have started; it is a spiritual emotion, a turning towards the future with an eager heart...
H.V. Morton
You're not allowed to have legs and not use them.Dance.
Dianna Hardy
Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love - that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one's very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive aut
George Eliot
I guess sometimes there are moments when people’s lives change and they don’t even know it. They can look back later, when everything's different, and say yes, that was the start of it―that’s when it all began, and I didn't even notice.
Robert Swindells
Human vanity is so constituted that it stiffens before difficulties. The more an object conceals itself from our eyes, the greater the effort we make to seize it, because it pricks our pride, it excites our curiosity and it appears interesting. In fighting for his God everyone, in fact, fights only for the interest of his own vanity, which, of all the passions produced bye the mal-organization of society, is the quickest to take offense, and the most capable of committing the greatest follies.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
A woman that you find different or strange, or whom you may envy or covet is deemed by you all to be a witch! Anything that you do not understand, you deem witchcraft!
Andrea Zuvich
Delay is the deadliest form of denial.
C. Northcote Parkinson
I've never taken a photograph of someone and created a persona, I've just discovered what was already there.
Anthony Farrimond
The mistake ninety-nine percent of humanity made, as far as Fats could see, were being ashamed of what they were, lying about it, trying to be somebody else. Honesty was Fats' currency, his weapon and defense. It frightened people when you were honest; it shocked them. Other people, Fats had discovered, were mired in embarrasment and pretense, terrified that their truths might leak out, but Fats was attracted by rawness, by everything that was ugly but honest, by the dirty things about which the likes of his father felt humiliated and disgusted. Fats thought a lot about messiahs and pariahs; about men labeled mad or criminal; noble misfits shunned by the sleepy masses.
J.K. Rowling
What in the blue star-blazes did you see in Jason?" he asked, still forcefully but with his frustration and jealousy under better control."For one thing, Djetth, he wasn't trying to kill me!"
Rowena Cherry
Slang surely, as it is called, comes of, and breathes of the personal
John Henry Newman
She handled it (her trade) with all the grace that belongs to mastery.
George Eliot
Sam was the only member of the party who had not been over the river before. He had a strange feeling as the slow gurgling stream slipped by: his old life lay behind in the mists, dark adventure lay in front.
J.R.R. Tolkien
A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.
G.K. Chesterton
... freedom is the knowledge of necessity and there is no wealth but life. When you understand that you understand everything.
Olivia Manning
No, no, no, so not getting the point of fear. Because fear wasn't about what made sense. Fear was about possibilities. Not things that happened. Things that might.
Michael Grant
Active evil is better than passive good
William Blake
Bit naïve, isn’t it? So much for the Age of Enlightenment.”“I grew up believing in dragons,” du Bois pointed out.
Gavin G. Smith
The fear of what might happen stops people but the trauma process is so beautiful and transformational. There is nothing to fear in our emotions, they will not swallow you whole - they will speak to you in profound ways.
Adele Theron
Be yourself. Don't worry about what other people are thinking of you.
Phil Lester
Learn to drive?""Never," said Quentin. "My mission in life is to be a passenger.
Diana Wynne Jones
The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited, he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.
John Stuart Mill
Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of everyday life - the need to eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or stepping out of top-storey windows, and the like.
George Orwell
Man is a coward in space, for he is by himself.
Richard Llewellyn
We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books—some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails—we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today.
Cory Doctorow
The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.
Douglas Adams
As a child I would play with such imagination that the ‘real’ world was never real at all. It was full of mystery, adventure and possibility.
Fennel Hudson
I'm independent and strong, but sometimes...just sometimes, it's nice to be taken case of. It's nice to be made to feel like a lady
Samantha Towle
Saying of the ProphetLoveDo you think you love your Creator? Love your fellow-creature first.
Idries Shah
An attractive woman becomes beautiful when she's happy and in love.
Chloe Thurlow