Quotes by British Authors - Page 571

...some people might think our lives dull and uneventful, but it does not seem so to us. ...it is not travel and adventure that make a full life. There are adventures of the spirit and one can travel in books and interest oneself in people and affairs. One need ever be dull as long as one has friends to help, gardens to enjoy and books in the long winter evenings.
D.E. Stevenson
I have never known birds of different species to flock together. The very concept is unimaginable. Why, if that happened, we wouldn't stand a chance! How could we possibly hope to fight them?
Alfred Hitchcock
Your naked body should only belong to those who fall in love with your naked soul.
Charlie Chaplin
If Innocent is happy, it is because he is innocent. If he can defy the conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments. It is just because he does not want to kill but to excite to life that a pistol is still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy. It is just because he does not want to steal, because he does not covet his neighbour's goods, that he has captured the trick (oh, how we all long for it!), the trick of coveting his own goods. It is just because he does not want to commit adultery that he achieves the romance of sex; it is just because he loves one wife that he has a hundred honeymoons.
G.K. Chesterton
Nothing of real worth can ever be bought. Love, friendship, honour, valour, respect. All these things have to be earned.
David Gemmell
You can't insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it.
D.H. Lawrence
Being busy is a distraction and I am sure that doing nothing, resting and sleeping are all good cures for modern life. I am not suggesting we all do nothing but sleep, however, sometimes stopping long enough to 'be' can be very powerful.
Joanna Runciman
The first rule of an expedition is that everyone should stick together.
Tahir Shah
Peace and happiness are powerful weapons against the Egos.
Belsebuub
Regression in grief must be seen and supported as a means toward adaptation and health.
Lily Pincus
The Church does not superstitiously observe days, merely as days, but as memorials of important facts. Christmas might be kept as well upon one day of the year as another; but there should be a stated day for commemorating the birth of our Saviour, because there is danger that what may be done on any day, will be neglected.
Samuel Johnson
In real life there is no such person as the average man. There are only particular men, women and children, each with his or her inborn idiosyncrasies of mind and body, and all trying (or becoming compelled) to squeeze their biological diversities into the uniformity of some cultural mold.
Aldous Huxley
Praying for your children is the most powerful way you can care for them.
Elizabeth George
Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barba
Neil Gaiman
I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.
P.G. Wodehouse
To know how to say what others only know how to think is what makes men poets or sages and to dare to say what others only dare to think makes men martyrs or reformers or both.
Elizabeth Charles
If you can hear the birds singing, you're in the right place
Benny Bellamacina
There is no problem the mind of man can set that the mind of man cannot solve.
Samuel Johnson
There is a danger of developing a blanket distaste for modern life which could have its attractions but lack the all-important images to help us identify them.
Alain de Botton
A mother does not become pregnant in order to provide employment to medical people. Giving birth is an ecstatic jubilant adventure not available to males. It is a woman's crowning creative experience of a lifetime.
John Stevenson
We can become so cruel and so selfish when we are afraid.
Anne Perry
At the dawn of the second decade of the Twenty First Century, masculinity has been rendered so self-conscious in our mediated, mirrored world that even ‘regular guys’ are apparently just a fashion fad – this season’s accessory.
Mark Simpson
If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to ­music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient.", 25 February 2010]
Hilary Mantel
I know it was wonderful but I don't know how I did it.
Sir Laurence Olivier
Why did I do such-and-such a thing?' is all very well. But what about 'How otherwise could I have done it?
Idries Shah
Through a strange kind of geographic arrogance, Europeans like to think that the world was a silent, dark, unknown place until they trooped out and discovered it.
Tahir Shah
Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel for love is not ours to command.
Alan Watts
Teach don't preach!
Habeeb Akande
To crooked eyes truth may wear a wry face
J.R.R. Tolkien
No milk. It is black coffee, pure but strong, that fortifies against the powers of darkness with which the world is filled.
Robert Aickman
Sexton: I think the whole world's gone mad.Death: Uh-uh. It's always like this. You probably just don't get out enough.
Neil Gaiman
It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.
W Somerset Maugham
Phrases like 'the team spirit' are always employed to cut across individualism, love and personal loyalties.
Muriel Spark
Here I was alone, and could take my own time. In other parts of the world one always seems to be in a great hurry, tearing from one spot to the other at a gallop, but out yonder, perhaps because distances are so great, time don't seem to matter; you can jog along, breathing fresh air and enjoying the scenery and your own thoughts about women and home and hunting and booze and money and what may lie over the next hill.
George MacDonald Fraser
Same as you, Arthur. I hitched a ride. After all, with a degree in maths and another in astrophysics it was either that or back to the dole queue on Monday. Sorry I missed the Wednesday lunch date, but I was in a black hole all morning.
Douglas Adams
How many miles to Babylon?Three score and ten!Can I get there by candle light?Yes, and back again!
E Nesbit
There was one question, however, which Inciarte had asked him and he could not answer. Why was it that he had lived while others had died? What purpose had God in making this selection? What sense could be made out of it? ‘None,’ replied Father Andrés. ‘There are times when the will of God cannot be understood by our human intelligence. There are things which in all humility we must accept as a mystery.
Piers Paul Read
Is all ordained? Foreknowledge is not fate, and we may choose our paths, yet fate says we may not choose them. So if fate is real, do we have a choice?
Bernard Cornwell
Now therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour Than languish in his slow-chapped power.Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball, And tear our pleasures with rough strife Thorough the iron gates of life: Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Andrew Marvell
For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Take full control by creating a life of true bliss through utilising the Power of The Heart.
Steven Redhead
So, you want the dirt on Hell boy or not?~ Taylor (to Erin about Veiron) Her Demonic Angel ~
Felicity Heaton
Them as can do has to do for them as can't. And someone has to speak up for them as has no voices.
Terry Pratchett
It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession
Thomas Hardy
Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.
Virginia Woolf
Algol is the name of the winking demon star, Medusa of the skies; fair but deadly to look on, even for one who is already dying.Ah, the bright stars of the night.Almost they obliterate the clear white pain. A thousand stars shining in the ether; but no dazzling newcomer. And so little time left, so little time...Yet still two-faced Medusa laughs from behind the clouds, demanding homage. Homage, Medusa, or a sword, a blade sharper than death itself.The wind stirs. Night clouds obscure the universe. A lower music now, a different kind of death.No stars tonight, my love.No Selene.
Elizabeth Redfern
Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.
T.S Eliot
Jane! will you hear reason?' (he stooped and approached his lips to my ear) 'because, if you won't, I'll try violence.
Charlotte Brontë
There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.
Charlotte Brontë
Critical thinking does seem a superior sort of thinking because it seems as though the critic is actually going beyond the scope of what is being criticized in order to criticize it. That is only rarely a true assumption because, most often, the critic will seize on some little aspect that he or she understands and tackle only that.
Edward de Bono
Are we entirely ready, sir?" said Lieutenant Hornett, with the special inflection that means "We are not entirely ready, sir.""We had better be. Glory awaits, gentlemen. In the words of General Tacticus, 'let us take history by the scrotum.' Of course, he was not a very honourable fighter.
Terry Pratchett
God's nothing more than a twelve-year-old kid with an ant farm. He's always watching, but He's never gonna do anything.
John Constantine
A man will will never know a woman until he knows her work.
Richard Llewellyn
I remember laughing at that moment, and I remember my son frowning at me in puzzlement. What I remember best of all, though, was the sudden certainty that the gods were with me, that they would fight for me, that my sword would be their sword. ‘We’re going to win,’ I told my son. I felt as if Odin or Thor had touched me. I had never felt more alive and never felt more certain. I knew there would be no more mistakes and that this was no dream.I had come to Bebbanburg and Bebbanburg would be mine.
Bernard Cornwell
Just because everybody uses language, that doesn't mean that they can write even tolerable prose.
Stephen Jones
No time for better words, no time to unsay anything.-Til We Have Faces
C.S. Lewis
Cats have been all over the Internet for many years. This makes total sense, as they seem to spend half their lives trying to stand and sit on the keyboards of our laptops.
Tom Cox
If we really want to learn how to forgive, perhaps we had better start with something easier than the Gestapo.
C.S. Lewis
... With the 'death' of God worldly values proliferate, separate out and are drawn into endless conflict with one another. This process leads to the formation of a world torn by an infinite number of value-conflicts, for 'rational' (scientific) knowledge, which, for Weber, is limited to questions of fact rather than value, is unable to resolve the crisis of values that it itself inaugurated.
Nicholas Gane
I know that you always take around because you talk so much, but I like to always know what's happening in your world.
Anna Bell