Quotes by British Authors - Page 725

As much as possible, it is useful to think of all other beings as being just like me. Every living being strives for happiness. Every being wants to avoid all forms of suffering. They are not just objects or things to be used for our benefit. You know, Mahatma Gandhi once said: 'The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
David Michie
... and for the first time he realized the pain inevitable in any human relationship - pain suffered and pain inflicted. How foolish we were to be afraid of loneliness.
Graham Greene
It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.
Graham Greene
I'm a century old, an impossible age, and my brain has no anchor in the present. Instead it drifts, nearly always to the same shore. Today, as most days, it is 1962. The year I discovered love.
Meg Rosoff
Whether you agree with its policy or not, your dealing with government is not voluntary, but coercive. Government is the very antithesis of ‘free market’.
Dominic Frisby
Oh diary, I love her, I love her, I love her so much. Jordana is the most amazing person I have ever met. I could eat her. I could drink her blood. She's the only person I would allow to be shrunk to microscopic size and explore me in a tiny submersible machine. She is wonderful and beautiful and sensitive and funny and sexy. She's too good for me, she's too good for anyone! All I could do was let her know. I said: "I love you more than words. And I am a big fan of words.
Joe Dunthorne
She could do anything with dynamite, except eat it.
Clare Mulley
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.
Jasper Fforde
He had forgotten that God saw through the silk robes to the sinful heart, that the only wealth worth having was treasure in heaven, and that even the king had to kneel down in church. Feeling that everyone else was so much more powerful and sophisticated than he was, he had lost sight of his true values, suspended his critical faculties, and placed his trust in his superiors. His reward had been treachery.
Ken Follett
Oh, and 13.1 million American people had their homes foreclosed. Because their debt, it turns out, was real; it was only the debt within the financial sector that was imaginary. It was only the people who generated the crisis who got three magical wishes from an economic genie. There was no abracadabra for ordinary people; they just got abraca-fucked.
Russell Brand
And when I realized you had secrets too, I was glad. I thought we could be honest with each other. That we could finally rid ourselves of all the clutter from our past. Not our possessions, but the stuff we carry around inside our heads. Because that's what I've realized, living in One Folgate Street. You can make your surroundings as polished and empty as you like. But it doesn't really matter if you're still messed up inside. And that's all anyone's looking for really, isn't it? Someone to take care of the mess inside our heads?
J.P. Delaney
The great tragedy of Science: the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
Thomas Huxley
... people always credit prime ministers with more brains than they've got.
Ken Follett
The church is often called a killjoy for protesting against sexual license. But the real killing of joy comes with the grabbing of pleasure. As with credit card usage. the price tag is hidden at the start, but the physical and emotional debt incurred will take a long time to pay off.
N.T. Wright
Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.
H.G.Wells
It's not just a question of doing what you love for a living. It's about doing what you love with love. Then your life and all be transformed.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
International sport is war without shooting.
George Orwell
Earth's crammed with Heaven And every common bush afire with God.
E. B. Browning
Not all of Derrida's writing is to everyone's taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: 'What is it, to speak? How can I even speak of this? Who is this "I" who speaks of speaking?
Terry Eagleton
The sharp, superficial pain at being spoken to unkindly had obscured the deeper pain, which had not yet turned into something hard and heavy.
Olivia Sudjic
,,, let go of the real source of our unhappiness: our own self-obsession. Stress, loneliness, pessimism, financial worries, and unhappy relationships all have one thing in common: they're all about "me".
David Michie
You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.
Graham Greene
I think the only reason I never lost my mind is that I knew I was innocent. That wasn't a happy thought, so the dementors couldn't suck it out of me...but it kept me sane and knowing who I am...helped me keep my powers...
J.K. Rowling
Survival was more than the preservation of life. It was tenacity in the face of ruin, an unbroken resolve in the midst of defeat, a glimmer of hope in the maelstrom, and peace despite the wreckage.
Jocelyn Murray
But there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand's-breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first and last time, be within speaking distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the state which will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of time, when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth.
Virginia Woolf
For a moment amongst the crowd, I saw you. I've since found out it's common for people separated from someone they love to keep seeing that loved one amongst strangers; something to do with recognition units in our brain being too heated and too easily triggered. This cruel trick of the mind lasted only a few moments, but was long enough to feel with physical force how much I needed you.
Rosamund Lupton
If a little labour little are our gains. Man's fortunes are according to his pains.
Robert Herrick
The Bible is different because it is the Word of God, by which He speaks to me. Disagreeing with the Bible would be disagreeing with God. So when I read the Bible I want to place myself ‘under’ it. I want to receive the Scripture in such a way that over time, my thinking, feeling, choosing, believing and behaving will be molded by the Word God is speaking into my life. I don’t want to critique the Scriptures; I want them to critique me and change me.
Colin S. Smith
Oh! that look of love!" continued he, between his teeth, as he bolted himself into his own private room. "And that cursed lie; which showed some terrible shame in the background, to be kept from the light in which I thought she lived perpetually! Oh, Margaret, Margaret! Mother, how you have tortured me! Oh! Margaret, could you not have loved me? I am but uncouth and hard, but I would never have led you into any falsehood for me.
Elizabeth Gaskell
There can be no substitute for a personal study of the Word of God! Daily devotionals, Bible commentaries, and recorded messages by anointed preachers and teachers are wonderful and useful. However, they cannot take the place of the Word of God. They must not replace a time of personal study of the Word. Every Christian individual must study and meditate upon the Word for him or herself. Nobody can do that for anyone else.
Pedro Okoro
Mrs. Rouncewell holds this opinion because she considers that a family of such antiquity and importance has a right to a ghost. She regards a ghost as one of the privileges of the upper classes, a genteel distinction to which the common people have no claim.
Charles Dickens
Katherine of Aragon was speaking out for the women of the country, for the good wives who should not be put aside just because their husbands had taken a fancy to another, for the women who walked the hard road between kitchen, bedroom, church and childbirth. For the women who deserved more than their husband's whim.
Philippa Gregory
Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.
David Mitchell
Unhurt people are not much good in the world.
Enid Starkie
A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life.
W Somerset Maugham
Think then what it is to live on here eternally and yet be human; toage in soul and see our beloved die and pass to lands whither we maynot hope to follow; to wait while drop by drop the curse of the longcenturies falls upon our imperishable being, like water slow drippingon a diamond that it cannot wear, till they be born anew forgetful ofus, and again sink from our helpless arms into the void unknowable.
H. Rider Haggard
She wuz depressed. Yeah, she wuz on stuff for it. Like me. Sometimes it jus' takes you over. It's an illness," she said, although she made the words sound like "it's uh nill
Robert Galbraith
Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.
Hilary Mantel
DEATH is big business.Thank god for capitalism.
Anthony T.Hincks
Kublai went on as if he had not spoken.“Before you all, in the lands of my enemies, I declare myself great khan of the nation, of the khanates under my brothers, Hulegu and Arik-Boke, of the Chagatai khanate and all others. I declare myself great khan of the Chin lands and the Sung. I have spoken and my word is iron!
Conn Iggulden
Fate and destiny go hand in hand. It is impossible to change our destiny. Only the path upon which we walk to reach our destination alters. If we should stray from that path, fate will take control and guide us in the right direction.
J.A. Belfield
(about organizing books in his home library, and putting a book in the "Arts and Lit non-fiction section)I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.
Nick Hornby
(About the magic bathroom).If knowledge is money, and money is gold, then this is modern day Alchemy. Feces (wasted time) is turned into gold (knowledge).
Peter Rogers
When I hear that "Possession is the grave of love," I remember that a religion may begin with the resurrection.
F.H. Bradley
No sir," said Mr Molloy. "I'm mighty sorry I can't meet you in any way, but the fact is I'm all fixed up in Oil. Oil's my dish. I began in Oil and I'll end up in Oil. I wouldn't be happy outside of Oil.""Oh?" said Mr Carmody, regarding this Human Sardine with as little open hostility as he could manage on the spur of the moment.
P.G. Wodehouse
And my head told my heart"Let love grow"But my heart told my head"This time noThis time no
Mumford & Sons
[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.
C.S. Lewis
Death doesn't care about personalities - he's more interested in meeting quotas.
Jasper Fforde
From the experience of these years Dr. Lloyd-Jones was immovably confirmed in a truth which he had first seen in the New Testament. It was that evangelism is pre-eminently dependent upon the quality of the Christian life which is known and enjoyed in the church.
Iain H. Murray
Let truth be told - women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye. While there's life there's hope is a connviction not so entirely unknown to the "betrayed" as some amiable theorists would have us believe.
Thomas Hardy
Therefore, let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you.
Doreen Valiente
It's a curious thing that the mental life seems to flourish with its roots in spite, ineffable and fathomless spite. Always has been so! Look at Socrates, in Plato, and his bunch round him! The sheer spite of it all, just sheer joy in pulling somebody else to bits...Protagoras, or whoever it was! And Alcibiades, and all the other little disciple dogs joining in the fray! I must say it makes one prefer Buddha, quietly sitting under a bo-tree, or Jesus, telling his disciples little Sunday stories, peacefully, and without any mental fireworks. No, there's something wrong with the mental life, radically. It's rooted in spite and envy, envy and spite. Ye shall know the tree by its fruit.
D.H. Lawrence
What is honour? In Athens it is one thing, in Sparta another; and among the Medes it is something else again. But go where you will, there is no land where the dead return across the river.
Mary Renault
I am Nom-O-Tron,' said the machine, in a big, boomy voice, so loud that Astra was afraid her mum and dad or some other grown-ups would hear and come to see who was sneaking a bedtime snack. 'Shhh!' she said. 'Have you got any biscuits?
Philip Reeve
He liked to address every man in his own language, as a good European should.
H.G.Wells
Anytime that you look up to the clear sky and see colors in it, you should be suspecting that you are looking at a flow of energy through the sky that is causing a gas to glow.
Steven Magee
The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.
Jeremy Bentham
Life is an accumulation of what your Heart and mind has pondered most, a conclusion of all you wishes, dreams and desires.
Steven Redhead
He only is exempt from failures who makes no effort.
Richard Whately
In the beginning Man created God and in the image of Man created he him.
Jethro Tull