Quotes by British Authors - Page 723

The bacteriologist, often risking his life to find cures for lethal afflictions, was another kind of imperial hero, as brave in his way as the soldier-explorer.
Niall Ferguson
The greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise as the greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure.
John Ruskin
Few in this world are ever simply nasty; those who hurt us are themselves in pain. The appropriate response is hence never cynicism nor aggression but, at the rare moments one can manage it, always love.
Alain de Botton
I had the luxury of knowing what I wanted to do. So I just sat on the bed and came up with a plan for myself:"I have to go to the Edinburgh Fringe. But I don't have the confidence to do a production there because I've never gone before, and I don't even know how to get there or what to do once I get there. So I will just act as if I do have the confidence to go to the Edinburgh Fringe. I'll just borrow confidence from a future version of myself. Once I've been to the Edinburgh Fringe and performed a show there, then I will have the confidence to go to the Edinburgh Fringe. I will go to the bank manager of confidence (in some part of my brain) and I will borrow that confidence from the future, and then I can wear it like a cloak, and I will talk to everyone with this confidence."It was out there as a concept, but it worked.
Eddie Izzard
Shakespeare 'never owned a book,' a writer for the New York Times gravely informed readers in one doubting article in 2002. The statement cannot actually be refuted, for we know nothing about his incidental possessions. But the writer might just as well have suggested that Shakespeare never owned a pair of shoes or pants. For all the evidence tells us, he spent his life naked from the waist down, as well as bookless, but it is probably that what is lacking is the evidence, not the apparel or the books.
Bill Bryson
Has it not occurred to you that, conversely, other people do not have your difficulties because they do not react as you do to what happens?
Idries Shah
Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.
W Somerset Maugham
That night she dreamed of the deer. Strangely, the animal was holding her. She cuddled close into the soft fur and touched and kissed it gently. In the morning her pillow was wet with tears.
Julie Andrews Edwards
When reading you have the opportunity to pause for thought & spark your imagination. It develops intellect. Nothing more threatening to a politician than a well read working class.
Alan Moore
We have to let go of mistakes we can no longer do anything about and move forward with clarity, focus on positivity.
Jay Woodman
To marry and have children, that is the common lot of women. Only one woman in a hundred--more, in a thousand, can make for herself a name and position as you have done.
Agatha Christie
Elves are extremely long-lived -- the passing years are but a blink of an eye to them. What also sets them apart from us is the very narrow window during which they can procreate, and, as a natural consequence, their very low fertility. The Aen Seidhe believe this to be the main reason for their decline. As one of my elven friends put it, "Even though we fought like wolves, we lost to a race which fucks like rabbits.
David Hodgson
... knowing what not to know was itself indispensable knowledge.
Ian Leslie
Thus the feeling I sometimes have - which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have - that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words, the total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, too easily.
Oliver Sacks
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
Bertrand Russell
Other people influence your life through their actions and thoughts.
Steven Redhead
Sometimes God’s way of answering prayer is not by removing the pressure, but by increasing your strength to bear it.
Elizabeth George
It was sad music. But it waved its sadness like a battle flag. It said the universe had done all it could, but you were still alive.
Terry Pratchett
Poor feeling hijacks thinking for self-deception: to hide harsh truths, avoid action, evade responsibility, and, as the existentialists might put it, flee from freedom. Thus, poor feeling is a kind of moral failing, indeed, the deepest kind, and virtue principally consists in correcting and refining our emotions and the values that they reflect. To feel the right thing is to do the right thing, without any particular need for conscious thought or effort.
Neel Burton
A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
C.S. Lewis
As for myself, I have found my perfect pattern in Jesus, who said, “The Father has not left Mealone, for I always do those things that please Him.” I am no longer motivated by personal ambition.I have discovered a sweeter, purer motive: simply to please my Father.
Derek Prince
An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.
Lawrence Durrell
I had always assumed that cliche was a suburb of Paris until I discovered it to be a street in Oxford.
Philip Guedalla
…but his problem was infinity; his problem was time running along the x-axis versus stress running along the y-axis, and there never seemed to be time without stress. Stress was a constant.
Andrew Barrett
I'm not letting go of you" - Sam
Jojo Moyes
I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.
Jeanette Winterson
If God annihilates or creates or deflects a unit of matter, He has created a new situation at that point. Immediately all nature domiciles this new situation, makes it at home in her realm, adapts all other events to it. It finds itself conforming to all the laws. If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born.
C.S. Lewis
I am not angry at Microsoft, as they did give me Windows 10 for free! I do feel a little misled about its reliability on older computers never certified for its installation by the manufacturer though.
Steven Magee
What after all is a halo? It's only one more thing to keep clean.
Christopher Fry
The biggest surprise that I had during my time in high altitude astronomy was being prevented from arranging a free Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) onsite evaluation to assist with bringing the observatory into OSHA compliance by the upper management team that I reported to.
Steven Magee
Never test another man by your own weakness.
Joseph Conrad
The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma
Henry James
How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.
Benjamin Disraeli
But why people need privacy? Why privacy is important? In China, every family live together, grandparents, parents, daughter, son and their relatives too. Eat together and share everything, talk about everything. Privacy make people lonely. Privacy make family fallen apart.
Xiaolu Guo
America: It's like Britain, only with buttons.
Ringo Starr
The commonplace books of the old Puritans were invaluable to them. They would never have been able to compile such works as they did if they had not been careful in collecting and arranging their matter under different heads.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
I could feel the weight of everything then --- the weight of loneliness, of everything that had gone wrong. I felt heroic, going up those last few flights to the top of the building, dragging that weight along with me. Jumping felt like the only way to get rid of it, the only way to make it work for me instead of against me; I felt so heavy that I knew I'd hit the street in no time. I'd beat the world record for falling off a tower block.
Nick Hornby
Between lovers, betrayal is always the worst sin.
Anthony Ryan
DO NOT PUT ALL YOUR TRUST IN ROOT VEGETABLES. WHAT THINGS SEEM TO BE MAY NOT BE WHAT THEY ARE.-Death
Terry Pratchett
Not only is happiness not money, it is not even like money.
Richard Koch
I thought to myself how we were so wrapped up in this animal act, that he couldn’t care less about his tea shop business, and I couldn’t care less about my job. That’s real sex that is, real passion: where you abandon all your boringly sensible thoughts, and all that tediously responsible side of yourself, as you give yourself to what you know really matters more, deep in the core of you: frantic sex.
Fiona Thrust
Anyhow, whether undergraduate or shop boy, man or woman, it must come as a shock about the age of twenty—the world of the elderly—thrown up in such black outline upon what we are; upon the reality; the moors and Byron; the sea and the lighthouse; the sheep’s jaw with the yellow teeth in it; upon the obstinate irrepressible conviction which makes youth so intolerably disagreeable—“I am what I am, and intend to be it,” for which there will be no form in the world unless Jacob makes one for himself. The Plumers will try to prevent him from making it. Wells and Shaw and the serious sixpenny weeklies will sit on its head.
Virginia Woolf
If you give in to temptation, you may have a moment of enjoyment, but then you'll have a lifetime of regrets.
Anthony T.Hincks
I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.
W Somerset Maugham
There were kind lies. You still look beautiful. I love you. I forgive you.There were frightened lies. Someone else must have taken it. Of course I am Anglican. I never saw that baby before.There were predatory lies. Buy this tonic if you want your child to recover. I will look after you. Your secret is safe with me.Half-lies, and the tense little silences where a truth should have been. Lies like knives, lies like poultices. The tiger's stripe, and the fawn's dusky dapple. And everywhere, everywhere, the lies that people told themselves. Dreams like cut flowers, with no nourishing root. Will-o'-the-wisp lights to make them feel less alone in the dark. Hollow resolutions and empty excuses.
Frances Hardinge
Children, be curious. Nothing is worse (I know it) than when curiosity stops. Nothing is more repressive than the repression of curiosity. Curiosity begets love. It weds us to the world. It's part of our perverse, madcap love for this impossible planet we inhabit. People die when curiosity goes. People have to find out, people have to know.
Graham Swift
He may be a Christian by common profession; but, in a saving sense, no man is a Christian, in whose soul any thing hath a greater and higher interest than God the Father, and the Mediator (352).
Richard Baxter
Despite the fact that logic tells us that we should not trust anyone, in any situation where the unknown variables are too many or the risks too high, we nevertheless go ahead and take what can only be called a leap of faith.
David Amerland
The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man
T.S Eliot
That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?. . . they say to themselves as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here, and it is thus that they speak with that self-confidence, that self-assurance, which have such profound consequences in public life and lead to such curious notes in the margin of the private mind.
Virginia Woolf
The first duty of a lecturer- to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever.
Virginia Woolf
It is always considered a piece of impertinence in England if a man of less than two or three thousand a year has any opinions at all upon important subjects.
Sydney Smith
Rain slips through your fingers as easily as words blow away in the wind, and yet it has the power to destroy your whole world.
Karen Maitland
Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying goodbye.
David Mitchell
He loved me and didn't want me hurt. What was worse, he didn't even understand that I had the right to be hurt.
Rosemary Sutcliff
Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependant upon it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure; and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard. You may die before you turn the next page.
John Fowles
To be busy with material affairs is the best preservative against reflection fears doubts ... all these things which stand in the way of achievement. I suppose a fellow proposing to cut his throat would experience a sort of relief while occupied in stropping his razor carefully.
Joseph Conrad
My vigour vitality and cheek repel me. I am the kind of woman I would run from.
Nancy Lady Astor
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.
Aldous Huxley
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
T.S Eliot