Quotes by British Authors - Page 513

It is the just doom of laziness and a gluttony to be inactive without ease and drowsy without tranquillity.
Samuel Johnson
How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?
George Eliot
He himself was almost never bored, and there was no man with whom it would have been a greater mistake to suppose that silence meant displeasure.
Henry James
We are all capable of so much more than we think, the only thing we need to do is change our beliefs
Steven Aitchison
And now that its ruby eyes are set into the gold, you cannot see their tear-shape, so they seem to be laughing rather than crying. It is a constant reminder to me of the human ability to create something beautiful even when things are at the darkest.
Cressida Cowell
All this long human story, most passionate and tragic in the living, was but an unimportant, a seemingly barren and negligible effort, lasting only for a few moments in the life of the galaxy. When it was over, the host of the planetary systems still lived on, with here and there a casualty, and here and there among the stars a new planetary birth, and here and there a fresh disaster.
Olaf Stapledon
See me for who I am, and then you'll see the real me.
Anthony T.Hincks
Many aspects of our screen-bound lives are bad for our social skills simply because we get accustomed to controlling the information that comes in, managing our relationships electronically, deleting stuff that doesn't interest us. We edit the world; we select from menus; we pick and choose; our social 'group' focuses on us and disintegrates without us. This makes it rather confusing for us when we step outdoors and discover that other people's behaviour can't be deleted with a simple one-stroke command or dragged to the trash icon.
Lynne Truss
The evils arising from the loss of her uncle were neither trifling nor likely to lessen; and when thought had been freely indulged, in contrasting the past and the present, the employment of mind and dissipation of unpleasant ideas which only reading could produce made her thankfully turn to a book.
Jane Austen
Previous journeys had taught me the danger of taking too much stuff.
Tahir Shah
In a fight to the death,I would in no doubt throw the fight.signed.....A pacifist
Anthony T.Hincks
Failure to commit is as bad as failure to start.
David Hieatt
Imagine. Freedom. Always.
Edward Rutherfurd
God give me work till my life shall end And life till my work is done.
Winifred Holtby
Looking from the window at the fantastic light and colour of my glittering fairy-world of fact that holds no tenderness, no quietude, I long suddenly for peace, for understanding.
Daphne du Maurier
Forgiveness is the highest and most difficult of all moral lessons.
Joseph Jacobs
Tiffany was on the whole quite a truthful person, but it seemed to her that there were times when things didn’t divide easily into ‘true’ and ‘false’, but instead could be ‘things that people needed to know at the moment’ and ‘things that they didn’t need to know at the moment’.
Terry Pratchett
She was a very pretty woman. She had dark red hair and her eyes -- her eyes are just like mine, Harry thought, edging a little closer to the glass. Bright green -- exactly the same shape, but then he noticed that she was crying; smiling, but crying at the same time. The tall, thin, black-haired man standing next to her put his arm around her. He wore glasses, and his hair was very untidy. It stuck up at the back, just like Harry's did.Harry was so close to the mirror now that his nose was nearly touching that of his reflection."Mum?" he whispered. "Dad?"They just looked at him, smiling. And slowly, Harry looked into the faces of the other people in the mirror and saw other pairs of green eyes like his, other noses like his, even a little old man who looked as though he had Harry's knobbly knees -- Harry was looking at his family, for the first time in his life.The Potters smiled and waved at Harry and he stared hungrily back at them, his hands pressed flat against the glass as though he was hoping to fall right through it and reach them. He had a powerful kind of ache inside of him, half joy, half terrible sadness.
J.K. Rowling
Our heads are filled with ‘knowledge’, a knowledge that in some areas pre-empts our seeing anything at all.
Idries Shah
The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit - not a part of the world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmaresif there seemed any danger of their coming true!
Logan Pearsall Smith
Just give me a second. Attempting to give a fuck...Attempting harder to give a fuck...Sorry, there was an error; fuck not given.
Suzanne Wright
But the thing that . . . that I touched . . . " I cried. "It was furry! It-" I stopped short, taken with a shudder. "I know," said Herrick.
Margery Williams Bianco
I feel successful when the writing goes well. This lasts five minutes. Once when I was on the bestseller list I also felt successful. That lasted three minutes.
Jacqueline Briskin
To cry at will is not an easy accomplishment.
Agatha Christie
It is one of the saddest spectacles of our time to see a great democratic movement support a policy which must lead to the destruction of democracy and which meanwhile can benefit only a minority of the masses who support it. Yet it is this support from the Left of the tendencies toward monopoly which make them so irresistible and the prospects of the future so dark.
Friedrich A. Hayek
It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.
Stephen Fry
[Tolstoy] denounced [many historians'] lamentable tendency to simplify. The experts stumble onto a battlefield, into a parliament or public square, and demand, "Where is he? Where is he?" "Where is who?" "The hero, of course! The leader, the creator, the great man!" And having found him, they promptly ignore all his peers and troops and advisors. They close their eyes and abstract their Napoleon from the mud and the smoke and the masses on either side, and marvel at how such a figure could possibly have prevailed in so many battles and commanded the destiny of an entire continent. "There was an eye to see in this man," wrote Thomas Carlyle about Napoleon in 1840, "a soul to dare and do. He rose naturally to be the King. All men saw that he was such."But Tolstoy saw differently. "Kings are the slaves of history," he declared. "The unconscious swarmlike life of mankind uses every moment of a king's life as an instrument for its purposes." Kings and commanders and presidents did not interest Tolstoy. History, his history, looks elsewhere: it is the study of infinitely incremental, imperceptible change from one state of being (peace) to another (war).The experts claimed that the decisions of exceptional men could explain all of history's great events. For the novelist, this belief was evidence of their failure to grasp the reality of an incremental change brought about by the multitude's infinitely small actions.
Daniel Tammet
The thing about the black market is, it’s racist. White children make useful slaves, too.
M.C. Humphreys
Every moment is the paradox of now or never.
Simon Van Booy
I am growing old of course, but I am still in the early stages of disintegration, and regarded as just about cool enough by some fashionable young ppl to be permitted to think aloud.
Pete Townshend
And when [Bëor] lay dead, of no wound or grief, but stricken by age, the Eldar saw for the first time the swift waning of the life of Men, and the death of weariness which they knew not in themselves; and they grieved greatly for the loss of their friends. But Bëor at the last had relinquished his life willingly and passed in peace; and the Eldar wondered much at the strange fate of Men, for in all their lore there was no account of it, and its end was hidden from them.
J.R.R. Tolkien
The self was both its origins and its journey.
Salman Rushdie
Oh really?’ said Mayes raising a mocking eyebrow which put Rob in mind of a poor man’s Roger Moore. ‘And what on earth makes you think that you of all people would be allowed anywhere near our board meeting? Rob’s smile widened as he realised that he was about to have one of those golden bombshell moments of the type he’d been on the receiving end of all too frequently over the last few days. ‘Because Mr. Mayes, I’m your new chairman.
Dougie Brimson
If you set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing." ~ Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher
I was too proud to show him how hurt I was.
Kate le Vann
Let me tell you a secret, a tremendous and wonderful secret. Let me share with you something so valuable that any schoolboy would gladly trade his most treasured procession to find out what I shall tell you.
Maxwell Grantly
I told her we were going to get married, and all she could talk about was frogs.She said there's these hills where it's hot and rains all the time, and in the rainforests there are these very tall trees and right in the top branches of the trees there are these like great big flowers called . . . bromeliads, I think, and water gets into the flowers and makes little pools and there's a type of frog that lays eggs in the pools and tadpoles hatch and grow into new frogs and these little frogs live their whole lives in the flowers right at the top of the trees and don't even know about the ground, and once you know the world is full of things like that, your life is never the same.
Terry Pratchett
No furniture is so charming as books.
Sydney Smith
Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention?
Joseph Conrad
Everyone has got their own ideas and they push them and say to hell with everyone else. That's the history of the human race. It got us on top, only now it is pushing us off. The thing is that people will put up with any kind of discomfort, and dying babies, and old age at thirty as long as it has always been that way. Try to get them to change and they fight you, even while they're dying, saying it was good enough for grandpa so it's good enough for me. Bango, dead.
Harry Harrison
What do you think that fish is?' Sam asked Astrid.,' she said.'Yeah?' Sam made a face. 'Do you think it's okay to eat?'? Inedible? Joke, duh. Try to keep up, Sam, I made that really easy for you.'Sam smiled. 'You know, a real genius would have known I wouldn't get it. Ergo, you are not a real genius. Hah. That's right. I threw down an 'ergo.''She gave him a pitying look. 'That's very impressive, Sam. Especially from a boy who has twenty-two different uses for the word 'dude.
Michael Grant
When we've got a common philosophy and a common objective; then we can advance in open order. We shall be a great team. But we've got to make sure of that common set of ideas. Maybe we shall find our formulae difficult for some of these new types. If we keep our minds open, we may find that they are right and that our formulae have to be modified. Probably -- it's a thought that shouldn't dishearten us -- but probably we don't know everything.
H.G.Wells
A banal mysticism, which is so banal that all the mysticism seems to have evaporated long ago, binds 'us' to the homeland - that special place which is more than a place, more than a geophysical area.
Michael Billig
The moment he left the warm sheets and the door clicked shut, I had that feeling you get when you are lost in a strange town at night. I curled into the chair where he had watched me undress and tears wet my cheeks. Then I dried my eyes, I looked in the mirror, and I said these two words. Never again.
Chloe Thurlow
The sky was like ebony and the only illumination was the harsh white light of the central streetlamp, which cast shadows so hard it seemed you might cut yourself on them.
Jasper Fforde
Everyone become a creation of their environment.
Steven Redhead
But then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?
Charles Darwin
The teacher is a catalyst to convert information from a high energy state (list of facts) to a low energy state (visual concept associated with known concepts).
Peter Rogers
Instead of turning away from them (war conditions) in instinctive horror, as people seem to expect, the child may turn towards them with primitive excitement. The real danger is not that the child, caught up all innocently in the whirlpool of war, will be shocked into illness. The danger lies in the fact that the destruction ranging in the outer world may meet the very real aggressiveness ranging in the inside of the child
Anna Freud
The things that are essential to salvation are so exceedingly simple that no child need sit down in despair of understanding the things which make for his peace. Christ crucified is not a riddle for sages, but a plain truth for plain people. True it is meat for men, but it is also milk for babes.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
What we do every time we pray is to confess our impotence and God's sovereignty.
J.I. Packer
Probably in a parallel universe not far from here, I'm working for Nintendo.
David Mitchell
You are a girl, Shirin. Girls don’t run around naked.’‘Why?’‘They just don’t.
Renita D'Silva
Fun is closely related to Joy -- a sort of emotional froth arising from the play of instinct.
C.S. Lewis
In two months, I think, my college job will end. In two months I will have no office, no college, no salary, no home. Everything will be different. But, I think, everything already is. When Alice dropped down the rabbit-hole into Wonderland she fell so slowly she could take things from the cupboards and bookshelves on the walls, look curiously at the maps and pictures that passed her by. In my three years as a Cambridge Fellow there’d been lectures and libraries and college meetings, supervisions, admissions interviews, late nights of paper-writing and essay-marking, and other things soaked in Cantabrian glamour: eating pheasant by candlelight at High Table while snow dashed itself in flurries against the leaded glass and carols were sung and the port was passed and the silver glittered upon dark-polished refectory tables. Now, standing on a cricket pitch with a hawk on my hand, I knew I had always been falling as I moved past these things. I could reach out and touch them, pick them off their shelves and replace them, but they were not mine. Not really ever mine. Alice, falling, looked down to see where she was headed, but everything below her was darkness.
Helen Macdonald
I'm not sure who invented dodgeball, but I can almost guarantee you that it wasn't the shortest kid in the class.
John Bingham
If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.
Hazel Henderson
Dreams free us from normality. Daydreams, especially, take us somewhere between the real world and the dream world.
Fennel Hudson
I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.
E.M. Forster