Quotes by British Authors - Page 6

The practice of the Sufis is too sublime to have a formal beginning,
Idries Shah
I have been a selfish being all my life in practice though not in principle.
Jane Austen
Ignorance screens the truth. It is on that screen that people paint pictures and write underneath their labels "god" and "not-god" and "theism.' and "atheism" .
Nanamoli Thera
When God “saves” people in this life, by working through His Spirit to bring them to faith, and by leading them to follow Jesus in discipleship, prayer, holiness, hope and love, such people are designed – it isn’t too strong a word – to be a sign and foretaste of what God wants to do for the entire cosmos. What’s more, such people are not just to be a sign and foretaste of that ultimate “salvation”; they are to be part of the means by which God makes this happen in both the present and the future.
N.T. Wright
In North America there is the general belief that everything can be fixed that life can be fixed up. In Europe the view is that a lot can't be fixed up and that living properly is not necessarily a question of mastering the technology so much as learning to live gracefully within the constraints that the species invents.
Jonathan Miller
It rubs against me, dipping between my hot lips and makes me whimper with yearning. You remove it dramatically and raise it up, out of my eye line, although I imagine that you are inspecting it.“Yes, definitely a slut, aren’t you?”“Yes, sir.” I reply instantly. My voice sounds needy – already.
Felicity Brandon
The dead are often known to eat 27 and 53
David Almond
I might appear confident and chatty, but I spend most of my time laughing at jokes I don't find funny, saying things I don't really mean - because at the end of the day that's what we're all trying to do: fit in, one way or another, desperately trying to pretend we're all the same.
Tabitha Suzuma
The psalmist [of Psalm 119] was interested in truth and orthodoxy, in biblical teaching and theology, not as ends in themselves, but as means to the further ends of life and godliness. His ultimate concern was with the knowledge and service of the great God whose truth he sought to understand (pp. 22-23).
J.I. Packer
There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.
Christopher Hitchens
I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it.
Neil Gaiman
It is hard for us to imagine now, but our earliest human ancestors who ventured out onto the grasslands of East Africa some six million years ago were remarkably weak and vulnerable creatures. They stood less than five feet tall. They walked upright and could run on their two legs, but nowhere near as fast as the swift predators on four legs that pursued them. They were skinny—their arms could not provide much defense. They had no claws or fangs or poison to resort to if under attack. To gather fruits, nuts, and insects, or to scavenge dead meat, they had to move out into the open savanna where they became easy prey to leopards or packs of hyenas. So weak and small in number, they might have easily become extinct.And yet within the space of a few million years (remarkably short on the time scale of evolution), these rather physically unimpressive ancestors of ours transformed themselves into the most formidable hunters on the planet. What could possibly account for such a miraculous turnaround?
Robert Greene
Do unto others…’ is a good rule of thumb. I live by that. Forgiveness is probably the greatest virtue there is. But that’s exactly what it is - a virtue. Not just a Christian virtue. No one owns being good. I’m good. I just don’t believe I’ll be rewarded for it in heaven. My reward is here and now. It’s knowing that I try to do the right thing. That I lived a good life. And that’s where spirituality really lost its way. When it became a stick to beat people with. ‘Do this or you’ll burn in hell.’ You won’t burn in hell. But be nice anyway.
Ricky Gervais
Dew settles without the fanfare of thunder or patter of falling rain, yet our wet feet in the morning still tell us there is something there. Sometimes miracles are like that. There is no overwhelming proof, but deep inside we know.
Chris Stewart
Flexibility is the greatest strength.
Steven Redhead
Who is the wrong person to criticise?You
Idries Shah
Your success in the job market has nothing to do with the job market itself - instead it has everything to do with you.
Simon Gray
Remember, when you are dead, you do not know you are dead. It is only painful for others.The same applies when you are stupid.
Ricky Gervais
You call me an unbeliever. I shall therefore call you a True Believer since a lie is best met with one of similar magnitude.
Idries Shah
It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.
Nick Hornby
Maybe that's when bad scripts are written, when you choose the theme first. I consider that I've something to say when I've thought of a person, a moment, a single beat of the heart, that I think is true and interesting, and therefore should be seen.
Russell T. Davies
Follow your dreams with determination and conviction until they become true.
Steven Redhead
I told some imprecisely imagined interlocutor that each year I hoped to have outgrown being moved by the autumn and each year I hadn't
Brigid Brophy
Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?
Thomas Hardy
Some carry beautifully crafted swords all their lives, and never realise, until they are daubed in blood, that the pleasure comes not from owning a sword, no matter how perfect, but from letting it cut.
John French
The man who seeks one thing in life and but one May hope to achieve it before life be done. But he who seeks all things wherever he goes Only reaps from the hopes which around him he sows A harvest of barren regrets.
Owen Meredith
I think, well, I've had a shit of a life, all things considered. It wasn't fair. Everyone I've ever loved is dead, and my leg hurts all the bloody time... But I think, any God that can do sunsets like that, a different one every night... 'Strewth, well, you've got to respect the old bastard, haven't you?
Neil Gaiman
Honour looked so much like a child herself, confined to bed, a white nightgown, like one of those maudlin Victorian dolls. Her cheeks were red, like someone had painted them, but I knew it was from rubbing, wiping away her melancholy.
Ruth Ahmed
But the windows of the house of Memory, and the windows of the house of Mercy, are not so easily closed as windows of glass and wood. They fly open unexpectedly; they rattle in the night; they must be nailed up. Mr. The Englishman had tried nailing them, but had not driven the nails quite home. So he passed but a disturbed evening and a worse night.
Charles Dickens
Sometimes life is a series of obstacles, a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. Sometimes, she realizes suddenly, it is simply a matter of blind faith.
Jojo Moyes
By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life. Thus defined, religion consists of two elements, a theoretical and a practical, namely, a belief in powers higher than man and an attempt to propitiate or please them. Of the two, belief clearly comes first, since we must believe in the existence of a divine being before we can attempt to please him. But unless the belief leads to a corresponding practice, it is not a religion but merely a theology; in the language of St. James, “faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.” In other words, no man is religious who does not govern his conduct in some measure by the fear or love of God. On the other hand, mere practice, divested of all religious belief, is also not religion. Two men may behave in exactly the same way, and yet one of them may be religious and the other not. If the one acts from the love or fear of God, he is religious; if the other acts from the love or fear of man, he is moral or immoral according as his behaviour comports or conflicts with the general good.
James George Frazer
Does he tell you that you’re allhe thinks about? Does he tell you that he lives for you?That he breathes for you? That he dreams of you everydamn moment, awake and asleep? Does he tell you anyof that?’ He pauses to look at me and I try to keep a blankface. ‘No, I didn’t think so,’ he says quietly.
Mila Gray
Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book.
David Mitchell
Only give a woman love, and there is nothing she will not venture, suffer, and do.
Wilkie Collins
‎W. H. Auden once suggested that to understand your own country you need to have lived in at least two others. One can say something similar for periods of time: to understand your own century you need to have come to terms with at least two others. The key to learning something about the past might be a ruin or an archive but the means whereby we may understand it is--and always will be--ourselves.
Ian Mortimer
The position of the Atheist is a clear and reasonable one. I know nothing about ‘God’ and therefore I do not believe in Him or in it; what you tell me about your God is self‐contradictory, and therefore incredible. I do not deny ‘God,’ which is an unknown tongue to me; I do deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without God.
Annie Besant
We desire to keep the dying and the newly dead close before our eyes so as to give them full need of pity. Our Lord was brought down to be pitied, on the Cross He was too far away.
Barry Unsworth
The first condition, then, of what is called a selfish love among men is lacking with God. He has no natural necessities, no passion, to compete with His wish for the beloved's welfare; or if there is in Him something which we have to imagine after the analogy of a passion, a want it is there by His own will and for our sakes. And the second condition is lacking too. The real interests of a child may differ from that which his father's affection instinctively demands, because the child is a separate being from the father with a nature which has its own needs and does not exist solely for the father nor find its whole perfection in being loved by him and which the father does not fully understand. But creatures are not thus separate from their Creator, nor can He misunderstand them. The place for which He designs them in His scheme of things is the place they are made for. When they reach it their nature is fulfilled and their happiness attained: a broken bone in the universe has been set, the anguish is over. When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy. Those Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshal us where we should want to go, if we knew what we wanted. He demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration.
C.S. Lewis
Extolling the virtues of conservation of energy, Churchill advised, "Never stand when you can sit, and never sit when you can lie down.
Winston S. Churchill
Corrupt governments are run by corrupt politicians that run corrupt law enforcement agencies.
Steven Magee
You would hardly think, at first, that horrid monsters lie up there waiting to be discovered by any moderately penetrating mind--monsters to which those of the oceans bear no sort of comparison."What monsters may they be?"Impersonal monsters, namely, Immensities. Until a person has thought out the stars and their inter-spaces, he has hardly learnt that there are things much more terrible than monsters of shape, namely, monsters of magnitude without known shape. Such monsters are the voids and waste places of the sky... In these our sight plunges quite beyond any twinkler we have yet visited. Those deep wells for the human mind to let itself down into, leave alone the human body! and think of the side caverns and secondary abysses to right and left as you pass on!...There is a size at which dignity begins," he exclaimed; "further on there is a size at which grandeur begins; further on there is a size at which solemnity begins; further on, a size at which awfulness begins; further on, a size at which ghastliness begins. That size faintly approaches the size of the stellar universe. So am I not right in saying that those minds who exert their imaginative powers to bury themselves in the depths of that universe merely strain their faculties to gain a new horror?
Thomas Hardy
People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in the places where everybody is kept in the dark.
Tom Stoppard
Whatever goes into a salt-mine becomes salt.
Idries Shah
People are so overwhelmed with the prestige of their instruments that they consider their personal judgement of hardly any account.
Wyndham Lewis
The true test of independent judgement is being able to dislike someone who admires us.
Sydney J. Harris
Luck is a goddess not to be coerced and forcibly wooed by those who seek her favours. From such masterful spirits she turns away. But it happens sometimes that, if we put our hand in hers with the humble trust of a little child, she will have pity on us, and not fail us in our hour of need.
P.G. Wodehouse
Wherever I am, if I've got a book with me, I have a place I can go and be happy.
J.K. Rowling
He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.
Virginia Woolf
Believe this," he whispered, and kissed her with the sharp, sleek kiss, the silver kiss, so swift and true, and razor sharp, and her warmth was flowing into him.
Annette Curtis Klause
I pulled the blanket around my shoulders. The sky was dark and vast and empty and not even a plane disturbed that sullen stillness, not even a star. The emptiness above was now mine within. It was a part of me, like a freckle, like a bruise. Like a middle name now one acknowledged.
Sarah Winman
We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?
Iris Murdoch
The NSA is looking for terrorists. They’re not getting psychosexual pleasure out of their schadenfreude about you.”—
Jon Ronson
A god that can be reduced to what reason can cope with is not a God that can be worshiped.
Alister E. McGrath
All things die,' she told him. Such a truism, it was the trite utterance of any street-corner philosopher, but coming from Inaspe Raimm it sounded different. 'All things reach the end of their journey, be they trees, insects, people or even principalities. All things die so that others may take their place. To die is no tragedy. The tragedy is dying with a purpose unfulfilled.
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Now I must live with the consequences of the choice I made. And I will not call it the wrong choice. That would be foolish and pointless. That choice led me to everything that has happened since, including this very moment, and the choices I make today or tomorrow or next week will lead me to the next and next present moments in my life. It is all a journey, Miss Jewell. I have come to understand that that is what life is all about-a journey and the courage and energy always to take the next step and the next without judgement about what was right and what was wrong.
Mary Balogh
The true history of the world must always be the history of the few; and as we measure the Himalaya by the height of Mount Everest, we must take the true measure of India from the poets of the Veda, the sages of the Upanishads, the founders of the Vedanta and Sankhya philosophies, and the authors of the oldest law-books, and not from the millions who are born and die in their villages, and who have never for one moment been roused out of their drowsy dream of life.
Friedrich Max Müller
...you’d be amazed at the grand tales the human brain will throw up to make sense of something nonsensical.
Dianna Hardy
The point... is to dwell upon the brightest parts in every prospect to call off the thoughts when turning upon disagreeable objects and strive to be pleased with the present circumstances.
Abraham Tucker
The future can not blame the present, just as the present cannot blame the past.
Susan Cooper
As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us.
Jeanette Winterson