Quotes by British Authors - Page 588

Hearts of oak are our ships Hearts of oak are our men.
David Garrick
It is very good, Wisehammer, it's very well written, but it's too-too-political. It will be considered provocative.""You don't want me to say it.""Not tonight. We have many people against us.""I could tone it down. I could omit 'We left our country for our country's good.'""That's the best line.
Timberlake Wertenbaker
Brother, if any man thinks ill of you, do not be angry with him. For you are worse than he thinks you to be. If he charges you falsely on some point, yet be satisfied, for if he knew you better he might change the accusation and you would be no gainer by the correction.If you have your moral portrait painted and it is ugly, be satisfied. For it only needs a few blacker touches and it would be still nearer the truth. “I will be base in my own sight.” This was well said. Perhaps if David had carried it out more fully and had been rendered watchful thereby, it might have saved him from his great fall. A sense of electing love will render you base in your own sight.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
I try not to speak to critics. It only encourages them.-Snagglepuss
Mark Russell
A more fundamental problem with labelling human distress and deviance as mental disorder is that it reduces a complex, important, and distinct part of human life to nothing more than a biological illness or defect, not to be processed or understood, or in some cases even embraced, but to be ‘treated’ and ‘cured’ by any means possible—often with drugs that may be doing much more harm than good. This biological reductiveness, along with the stigma that it attracts, shapes the person’s interpretation and experience of his distress or deviance, and, ultimately, his relation to himself, to others, and to the world. Moreover, to call out every difference and deviance as mental disorder is also to circumscribe normality and define sanity, not as tranquillity or possibility, which are the products of the wisdom that is being denied, but as conformity, placidity, and a kind of mediocrity.
Neel Burton
Fashion is never wrong.
Malcolm McLaren
Let's go to Valhalla with the sun on our faces.
Mark Lawrence
He was persuaded he could know no happiness but in the society of one with whom he could for ever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul.
Horace Walpole
Job understood that he was nothing more than God’s invention and so too was his suffering
Johnny Rich
What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions and the borders of states. Listen to this and remember it. The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be.
David Mitchell
Ask any Ferrari, Porsche or Ray-Ban salesperson about their average customer and you will very likely hear that he is not, as the adverts would have us believe, a virile young footballer with shiny hair, a rippling six pack and a trouser pouch like a new punch bag. He is, in fact, a middle-aged bloke wearing more chins than he started life with and carrying the clear evidence of forty years of beer and pies slung across his midriff.
Richard Hammond
Within a year or two, however, a couple of the first things I wrote – ‘Anarchy In The UK’ and ‘God Save The Queen’ – really hit their target. I’d like to thank the British public library system: that was my training ground, that’s where I learned to throw those verbal grenades. I wasn’t just throwing bricks through shop windows as a voice of rebellion, I was throwing words where they really mattered. Words count.
John Lydon
Better to shun the bait than struggle in the snare.
William Blake
First and most importantly, death is just the absence of life—oh, and for human beings, the absence of consciousness, too, but not just the absence of consciousness, the absence of the capacity for consciousness.
Charles Stross
That is what the taste of blood does. It takes away the gap between thought and action.To think is to do. There is no unlived life inside you as the air speeds past your body, as you look down at the dreary villages and market towns...
Matt Haig
I don't want anyone writing in to point out that I spend too much money on books, many of which I will never read. I know that already. I certainly intend to read all of them, more or less. My intentions are good. Anyway, it's my money. And I'll bet you do it too.
Nick Hornby
We act as a conduit for the observers’ unexpressed desires, the silent appreciation they may contain for anything; a lover, a river, a building even
Guy Mankowski
Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action."(p.115)
Malcolm Gladwell
The future is the shape of things to come.
H.G.Wells
Your own space, man, it's so important. That's why we were doomed because we didn't have any. It is like monkeys in a zoo. They die. You know, everything needs to be left alone.
George Harrison
No matter how long your night may have been, as the earth remains, your morning will definitely come.
Pedro Okoro
The Forest that had been about her all her life, certain as a mountain, was made ashes. The high gable that had stood for two hundred years fallen in ruin. Throvenland was torn apart like smoke on the wind. Nowhere would be safe, ever again.
Joe Abercrombie
I tell you, stupidity, self-protective stupidity, is the fundamental sin. No man alive has a right to contentment. No man alive has a right to mental rest. No man has any right to be as stupid as educated, Liberal men have been about that foolish affair at Geneva. Men who have any leisure, any gifts, any resources, have no right to stifle their consciences with that degree of imposture.
H.G.Wells
Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.
Samuel Butler
Trawling through a dusty attic of my addled memory I found that I’d been rather in a lot of daft and amusing situations, so I set about writing them down. The only problem being that I was a lot better at telling stories than writing them, probably because telling them involves a lot less typing and a lot more shouting.
Guy Pratt
I admired him more than anyone but I didn't wish him well. It was that I preferred him to me and wanted to be him. I coveted his talents, face, style. I wanted to wake up with them all transferred to me.
Hanif Kureishi
I have in this War a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Then there are the fully intentional pleasures, which, although in some way tied up with sensory or perceptual experience, are modes of exploration of the world. Aesthetic pleasures are like this. Aesthetic pleasures are contemplative - they involve studying an object OUTSIDE of the self, to which one is GIVING something (namely, attention and all that flows from it), and not TAKING, as in the pleasure that comes from drugs and drinks. Hence such pleasures are not addictive - there is no pathway to reward that can be short-circuited here, and a serotonin injection is not a cheap way of obtaining the experience of PARISFAL or THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.
Roger Scruton
Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun; today, to believe the past is inalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.
George Orwell
Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
Alain de Botton
The smell of home was indistinguishable from the smell of leaving home: each inhalation a mix of familiarity and fear.
Camilla Gibb
The Dean leaned toward an ear.“I was saying,” he said loudly, “that we didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘sex’ when we were young.”“That’s true. That’s very true,” said Poons. He stared reflectively at the flames. “Did we ever, mm, find out, do you remember?
Terry Pratchett
Philosophy cannot be extinguished, though men will try ... The spirit seeks the light, that is its nature. It wishes to return to its origin, and must forever try to reach enlightenment.
Iain Pears
What's important is finding out what works for you.
Henry Moore
Travel teaches toleration.
Benjamin Disraeli
I've always regarded it as a test of character to dislike the Kennedys. I don't really respect anyone who falls for Camelot.
Christopher Hitchens
Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarian regimes which horrify us follow of necessity. From the collectivist standpoint intolerance and brutal suppression of dissent, the complete disregard of the life and happiness of the individual, are essential and unavoidable consequences of this basic premise, and the collectivist can admit this and at the same time claim that his system is superior to one in which the "selfish" interests of the individual are allowed to obstruct the full realisation of the ends the community pursues.
Friedrich A. Hayek
In this passionately social world, loneliness dogged the spirit. People were constantly “getting together,” but they never really got there…For everyone searched his neighbor’s eyes for the image of himself, and never saw anything else. Or if he did, he was outraged and terrified.
Olaf Stapledon
Guns don't kill people. People kill people.''But guns make it so much easier. Shall we go?
Jonathan L. Howard
It is enough to know, too much to see.
Sally Gardner
He saw the reflection of her face in a compact mirror as she painted on her re lips. She did it with such care, he had felt she was trapping something behind the colour.She had touched life, played with it a little, bit it was a slippery bugger,and finally we must close the door, and leave it behind.
Rachel Joyce
Art is man's nature nature is God's art.
P. J. Bailey
There are no easy paths in this life. And when troubles arise, we must face them with the same dignity as we do success.
Jocelyn Murray
A key and a strangler - this is all a simple tale requires.
Steve Aylett
RebukeObstinate regressionbringing untold pathsof deep dark forebodingdepression...
Muse
Jealousy is when their reflection in the mirror that is your progress, is attacked rather than appreciated, begrudged rather than understood.
Sam Owen
Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.
John Ruskin
And so the Universe ended.
Douglas Adams
A human has seven litres of blood. This they had taught him in the army. Seven litres, which, with an arterial cut will vent a fountain two or three metres, and take three to four minutes to bleed out.
Richard House
The Labour party on the whole has not been a very effective opposition since the election, partly because it spent months and months electing its new leader. I think the Labour party should, for one thing, stress much more that for most people in the past 13 years, the period was not one of collapse into chaos but actually one where the situation improved, and particularly in areas such as schools, hospitals and a variety of other cultural achievements—so the idea that somehow or other it all needs to be taken down and ground into the dust is not valid. I think we need to defend what most people think basically needs defending and that is the provision of some form of welfare from the cradle to the grave.
Eric Hobsbawm
Don't bother looking for the meaning of it all. There isn't one.Maybe not, but life compulsively dangled the possibility. Life, the dramatist on speed. Life, that couldn't stop with its foreshadows and ironies and symbols and clues, its wretched jokes and false endings and twists. Life with its hopeless addiction to plot.
Glen Duncan
I am a feminist because I dislike everything that feminism implies. I desire an end to the whole business, the demands for equality, the suggestion of sex warfare, the very name feminist. I want to be about the work in which my real interests like, the writing of novels and so forth. But while inequality exists, while injustice is done and opportunity denied to the great majority of women, I shall have to be a feminist. And I shan't be happy till I get . . . a society in which there is no distinction of persons either male or female, but a supreme regard for the importance of the human being. And when that dream is a reality, I will say farewell to feminism, as to any disbanded but victorious army, with honour for its heroes, gratitude for its sacrifice, and profound relief that the hour for its necessity has passed.
Winifred Holtby
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, and I know of no substitute for the force and beauty of it's process.
Henry James
It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies, could they be made to understand how little the heart of a man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire... Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it. Neatness and fashion are enough for the former, and a something of shabbiness or impropriety will be most endearing to the latter.
Jane Austen
Linguist say parties in the conversation will tolerate silence for four seconds before interjecting anything, however unrelated.
Bill Bryson
There is a special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a long-desired goal has been attained at last, and that life must now be shaped towards new ends.
Arthur C. Clarke
We are in the process of finding out what filling billions of acres with huge wind turbines does to the global environment.
Steven Magee
I've got a woman's ability to stick to a job and get on with it when everyone else walks off and leaves it.
Margaret Thatcher
You may have a guardian angel,but I have a uzzi.You work out who's gunna come out on top!
Anthony Hincks
She walks in beauty Like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies And all that's best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes.
Lord Byron