Quotes by British Authors - Page 497

Un país gana más con un año de paz que con diez de guerra.
Jean Plaidy
Don’t live your life with anger and hate in your heart as you will only be hurting yourself more than the people you hate.
Robert Tew
as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.
Alain de Botton
The library was the best place in the world.
Anita Anand
Situated on an island which I think it will one day cover, it rises like Venice from the sea, and like that fairest of cities in the days of her glory, receives into its lap tribute of all the riches of the earth.- Frances Trollope (1827)
Frances Trollope
By his [God's] help I will arise and address myself diligently to my appointed duty. If happiness in this world is not for me, I will endeavor to promote the welfare of those around me, and my reward shall be hereafter.
Anne Brontë
Tesco at the best of times is soulless – but it’s so much worse at 6 in the morning. It’s not as empty as I thought it would be. Who the fuck shops at 6 a.m.? e florescent lights flicker. e shelf upon shelf of coloured cans make my eyes go funny. Everything is hard and shiny and there’s so much fucking choice. Why do I have to choose from thirty kinds of granola? Do I want Country Crunch or Rude Health? Raisins and almonds or tropical? Goji berries and chia seeds or Strawberry Surprise? I’ll just buy the Tesco range – that’ll be easiest. No, wait, there’s Tesco finest*, Tesco Everyday Value and Tesco Free From. What can be so damn fine about granola? You eat it everyday and what could it be free from? It hasn’t got anything unhealthy in it! What could one possibly take out? Actually, we don’t need any fucking granola.
Sanjida Kay
What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime.
Christopher Hitchens
Merlin’s beard.
J.K. Rowling
Animals are what we are and animals are what we'll stay.
Anthony T.Hincks
There is no universal language in the jungles; each species has its own language, and though the vocabulary of some is limited, as in the case of porcupines and vultures, the language of each species is understood by all the jungle-folk.
Jim Corbett
You must expect to make enemies.""I never expect to make anything else," he said.
Susan Kay
If you have always suspected your sister of an inclination to madness, it will be my pleasure to confirm your worst fears.
Mary Balogh
Coral, my love, you are too pure, too innocent, too alive for me,” he said slowly, almost carefully. “My world is like a drawing in black and white on a gray canvas, without a single note of color to bring it to life. And now, on this pale and melancholic picture, a red flower has fallen, a warm and scented flower.” He sighed. “It’s a wonderful contrast, but too vivid…
Hannah Fielding
We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are the signs of our ideas only and not for things themselves.
John Locke
Good writing like good sex requires discipline.
Chloe Thurlow
And so make life death and that vast forever One grand sweet song.
Charles Kingsley
So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.
Neil Gaiman
Maybe it’s not good trying to answer the question ‘What is my purpose in life?’ Maybe the better question is: ‘How can I make someone’s life better TODAY?
Steven Aitchison
I have never yet met a healthy person who worries very much about his health or a really good person who worries much about his own soul.
J.B.S. Haldane
But unless we determine to take action,' said the old man querulously, as if struggling against something deeply insouciant in his nature, 'then we shall all be destroyed, we shall all die. Surely we care about that?' 'Not enough to want to get killed over it,' said Ford.
Douglas Adams
I close my eyes and try and shut him out. My fingers don’t want to stay in time. They want to race ahead in fury, plunging into the dense fog of black notes, pulling the music out by its roots, hurling it up out of the piano and into the air.
Tabitha Suzuma
She had lost herself in this old work, her personality dissolving into it, so that she had been set free. The immortality of the soul lies in its dissolution; this was the cryptic comment that so frustrated Olivier and which Julien had only ever grasped as evidence for the history of a particular school of thought. He had known all about its history, but Julia knew what it meant. He found the realization strangely reassuring.
Iain Pears
There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man. That is a perfectly simple fact which the modern world will find out more and more to be a fact. Every other basis is a sort of sentimental confusion, full of merely verbal echoes of the older creeds. Those verbal associations are always vain for the vital purpose of constraining the tyrant.
G.K. Chesterton
Olivier took a deep breath, then turned and bowed in farewell. Gersonides nodded in return, then thought of something."The manuscript you brought me, by that bishop. It argues that understanding is more important than movement. That action is virtuous only if it reflects pure comprehension, and that virtue comes from the comprehension, not the action."Olivier frowned. "So?""Dear boy, I must tell you a secret.""What?""I do believe it is wrong.
Iain Pears
Ego depletion comes from American psychologist Roy Baumeister, who believes that enduring something stressful exhausts our capacity for willpower to the extent that we give in to our temptations that we would rather avoid.
Bruce Hood
the walking stick, like a burqa, conferred protective status...
Robert Galbraith
Wait on the Lord" is a constant refrain in the Psalms, and it is a necessary word, for God often keeps us waiting. He is not in such a hurry as we are, and it is not his way to give more light on the future than we need for action in the present, or to guide us more than one step at a time. When in doubt, do nothing, but continue to wait on God. When action is needed, light will come.
J.I. Packer
If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.
C.S. Lewis
Don't the great tales never end?""No, they never end as tales," said Frodo. "But the people in them come, and go when their part's ended. Our part will end later – or sooner.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Remember the Golden Rule? "Treat people as you would like to be treated." The best managers break the Golden Rule every day. They would say don't treat people as you would like to be treated. This presupposes that everyone breathes the same psychological oxygen as you. For example, if you are competitive, everyone must be similarly competitive. If you like to be praised in public, everyone else must, too. Everyone must share your hatred of micromanagement.
Marcus Buckingham
Have you ever wondered why you did not rapture and go to heaven the day you became a Christian? It is because God has work for you to do here on earth! Having gone to heaven, Jesus expects you to be his body on earth. You are his hands, his feet, his voice.
Pedro Okoro
In serving as a pastor for over thirty years, I have seen some remarkable transformations and I’ve seen some big disappointments. I have two observations. First, where there has been lasting change, the common factor, in every case, is that the Word of God has had a significant entrance into the person’s life. Second, where godly change has failed to get started, or has slowly unraveled, the common factor, in every case, is that change has been attempted without significant engagement in the Scriptures.
Colin S. Smith
Why stay we on earth except to grow?
Robert Browning
It is only when he speaks German, as now, that he allows himself to lament the enslavement of the world's downtrodden classes. "We cannot live in a bubble, Mr. Mundy. Comfortable ignorance is not a solution. In German student societies that I was not permitted to join, they made a toast: 'Better to be a salamander, and live in the fire.
John le Carré
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
J.R.R. Tolkien
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. It does much more than that, it tells us the truth about its readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all the more the more cynical and immoral be the motive of its manufacture.
G.K. Chesterton
Some drink to forget, I drink to remember. I drink in order to understand what I mean and to discover what I know. Under its benign influence all the stories and dramas which properly belong to the sphere of art are announced by me in conversation.
Peter Ackroyd
Time and time again, throughout the history of medical practice, what was once considered as "scientific" eventually becomes regarded as "bad practice".
David Stewart
[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey.
Terry Eagleton
Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of the story.
Neil Gaiman
Why do more than 40 percent of Americans think that the Universe began after the domestication of the dog?
Lalla Ward
You walked into my life when I was nineteen years old. You were the only man I ever loved - the only man I ever hope to love. You took everything we did together, everything we were to each other, and scorched it to nothing: left it a cloud of ash.
Laura Barnett
A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.
T.S Eliot
There is a point when facing the unknown stops being a longed-for adventure and becomes a terrifying reality.
Storm Constantine
Yo, bredren, we be the illest,' went my proclamation. 'We be the dopest,' Anand would follow. 'Our tunes are going to be good,' Nishant would finish with.
Nikesh Shukla
The truth is like salt. Men want to taste a little, but too much makes everyone sick.
Joe Abercrombie
God, A Poem 'I didn't exist at Creation, I didn't exist at the Flood, And I won't be around for SalvationTo sort out the sheep from the cud-'Or whatever the phrase is. The fact isIn soteriological termsI'm a crude existential malpracticeAnd you are a diet of worms
James Fenton
Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits...
A.A. Milne
I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating.
Neil Gaiman
...a great future behind him, already
Angela Carter
We're interested in the mass-merchandising of anything. If there was a market in mass-produced portable nuclear weapons, we'd market them too
Alan Sugar
The Brandy Diet is one of my personal favourites – you don’t lose any weight, but if you drink enough of the stuff then you neither care what you look like nor what people think of you. Also, if you’re very lucky, you can lose days.
Kensington Gore
Please don't be too prejudiced against the poor thing because she's a liar. I do really believe that, like so many liars, there is a real substratum of truth behind her lies. I mean that though, to take an instance, her atrocity stories have grown and grown until every kind of unpleasant story that has ever appeared in print has happened to her or her relations personally, she did have a bad shock initially and did see one, at least, of her relations killed. I think a lot of these displaced persons feel, perhaps justly, that their claim to our notice and sympathy lies in their atrocity value and so they exaggerate and invent.
Agatha Christie
And suddenly it came to him. That Strawberry Fields garden he'd come from, and the Freedom Tower he'd been thinking of: taken together, didn't they contain the two words that said it all about this city, the two words that really mattered? It seemed to him that they did. Two words: the one an invitation, the other an ideal, an adventure, a necessity. "Imagine" said the garden. "Freedom" said the tower. Imagine freedom. That was the spirit, the message of this city he loved. You really didn't need anything more. Dream it and do it. But first you must dream it.
Edward Rutherfurd
My vegetable love will growVaster than empires, and more slow.
Andrew Marvell
When I'd woken the next morning, I'd done so in a dislocated world of dimmed daylight and diluted colors, a sodden world, feeling like I was a castaway on an alien planet.
Keith Houghton
So we have twenty-four hours to keep out of trouble,’ he says to me.I slide a glance in his direction. Judging from the way he’s now grimacing at the sidewalk and the fact that I met him in a police station where he was being booked for stealing a car, I’m guessing that staying out of trouble is not his forte.
Sarah Alderson
The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.
Nicholas Butler
It was not her way to make a conspicuous entry into anyone’s life, but towards the end of that week Sebastian said rather sourly: “You and mummy seem very thick,” and I realized that in fact I was being drawn into intimacy by swift, imperceptible stages, for she was impatient of any human relationship that fell short of it.
Evelyn Waugh