Quotes by British Authors - Page 749

Friendship is a serious affection the most sublime of all affections because it is founded on principle and cemented by time. The very reverse may be said of love. In a great degree love and friendship cannot subsist in the same bosom even when inspired by different objects they weaken or destroy each other and for the same object can only be felt in succession. The vain fears and fond jealousies the winds which fan the flame of love when judiciously or artfully tempered are both incompatible with the tender confidence and sincere respect of friendship.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Last warning. I don't play nice.
Lindsay J. Pryor
Dialogue is about creating awareness through self-observation; it starts from the inside out, not the outside in.
Oli Anderson
Now you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names.
Neil Gaiman
If anyone has a new idea in this country there are twice as many people who keep putting a man with a red flag in front of it.
Prince Philip
The would-be Sufi needs guidance precisely because books, texts, while telling you what is needed, do not tell you when.
Idries Shah
Science, I am told, is making great strides, experimenting, groping after things which no sane man has ever dreamed of before – without being burned alive for it.
Walter de la Mare
My thoughts are wing'd with hopes,My hopes with love.Thoughts, hopes and love return to me no more,Until Cynthia shine as she hath done before.
Eve Edwards
I moved silently across the garden, silvered with moonlight, my feet barely touching the ground. I brushed past fern and tree, following the lights across the stream, toward the cottage in the clearing where I watched a little girl surrounded by light and laughter as the fairies threaded flowers through her hair. I stood out of sight, peering through the tangled blackberry bushes, but the girl saw me, rushing forward, her hand outstretched, a white flower clasped between her fingers. "For Mammy," she said. "For my Mammy.
Hazel Gaynor
Deteriorated science is a cult, so is imitative or deteriorated Sufism.
Idries Shah
Tiffany has been apprenticing as a witch by visiting people in need with her mentor. After meeting with one particularly sad case, she tells her mentor, "It shouldn't be like this." Her mentor replies, "There isn't a way things should be. There's just what happens, and what we do.
Terry Pratchett
If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole of language were present to me when I spoke, then I would not be able to articulate anything at all. The ego, or consciousness, can therefore only work by repressing this turbulent activity, provisionally nailing down words on to meanings. Every now and then a word from the unconscious which I do not want insinuates itself into my discourse, and this is the famous Freudian slip of the tongue or parapraxis. But for Lacan all our discourse is in a sense a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery and ambiguous as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say and never say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part-failure, mixing non-sense and non-communication into sense and dialogue.
Terry Eagleton
The fantastic cannot exist independently of that 'real' world which it seems to find frustratingly finite.
Rosemary Jackson
Everything comes if a man will only wait.
Benjamin Disraeli
Gnats drifted on the same warm summer breeze that saw colorful paper lanterns swaying on their strings. Lily of the valley filled jam jars at each table, but sweet peas had won out in the battle to fragrance the evening air.
Anouska Knight
Potential, and the will to deploy it. That's all magic is in the end, you know.
Richard K. Morgan
when somebody plays music, you listen. you just follow those sounds, and eventually you understand the music. the point can't be explained in words because music is not words, but after listening for a while, you understand the point of it, and that point is the music itself. in exactly the same way, you can listen to all experiences.
Alan W. Watts
The cell door opened. My hands went to my eyes. Why was the door opened? I wasn’t dead yet. I think.
Paul W.S. Bowler
The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Research suggests that sea level adapted humans that work at the very high altitude 13,796 feet summit of Mauna Kea may eventually develop sleep apnea and fatigue from the low oxygen environment.
Steven Magee
Up the coast a few miles north, in a lava reef under the cliffs, there are a lot of rock pools. You can visit them when the tide is out. Each pool is separate and different, and you can, if you are fanciful, give them names, such as George, Charlotte, Kenny, Mrs. Strunk. Just as George and the others are thought of, for convenience, as individual entities, so you may think of a rock pool as an entity; though, of course, it is not. The waters of its consciousness - so to speak - are swarming with hunted anxieties, grim-jawed greeds, dartingly vivid intuitions, old crusty-shelled rock-gripping obstinacies, deep-down sparkling undiscovered secrets, ominous protean organisms motioning mysteriously, perhaps warningly, toward the surface light. How can such a variety of creatures co-exist at all? Because they have to. The rocks of the pool hold their world together. And, throughout the day of the ebb tide, they know no other.
Christopher Isherwood
All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth unto such as keep his covenant."] The original Hebrew word that has been translated "paths" means "well-worn roads' or "wheel tracks," such ruts as wagons make when they go down our green roads in wet weather and sink in up to the axles. God's ways are at times like heavy wagon tracks that cut deep into our souls, yet all of them are merciful.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
But this is human life: the war, the deeds, The disappointment, the anxiety, Imagination’s struggles, far and nigh,All human; bearing in themselves this good, That they are still the air, the subtle food, To make us feel existence. -Keats, EndymionThis is the ‘goal’ of the soul path – to feel existence; not to overcome life’s struggles and anxieties, but to know life first hand, to exist fully in context. (Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul, p.260)
John Keats
You look especially beautiful this morning, Monza."That brought a smile to the corner of her mouth. The corner he couldn't see. "Well. Facts are facts.
Joe Abercrombie
Why O why did I ever leave my hobbit-hole?" said poor Mr. Baggins, bumping up and down on Bombur's back.
J.R.R. Tolkien
A woman who is found without her veil in some regions of Islam will it is reported raise her skirt to cover her face.
Raymond Mortimer
I have found a dream of beauty at which one might look all one's life and sigh.
Isabella L. Bird
I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.
Stanley Kubrick
Until the evil man finds evil unmistakably present in his existence, in the form of pain, he is enclosed in illusion.
C.S. Lewis
Angling is a sport, so sporting ethics should apply.
Fennel Hudson
It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.
Bill Bryson
He himself, Anthony went on to think, he himself had chosen to regard the whole process as either pointless or a practical joke. Yes, chosen. For it had been an act of the will. If it were all nonsense or a joke, then he was at liberty to read his books and exercise his talents for sarcastic comment; there was no reason why he shouldn't sleep with any presentable woman who was ready to sleep with him. If it weren't nonsense, if there was some significance, then he could no longer live irresponsibly. There were duties towards himself and others and the nature of things. Duties with whose fulfilment the sleeping and the indiscriminate reading and the habit of detached irony would interfere. He had chosen to think it nonsense, and nonsense for more than twenty years the thing had seemed to be – nonsense, in spite of occasional uncomfortable intimations that there might be a point, and that the point was precisely in what he had chosen to regard as the pointlessness, the practical joke.
Aldous Huxley
Now, I have always wanted to agree with Lady Bracknell that there is no earthly use for the upper and lower classes unless they set each other a good example. But I shouldn't pretend that the consensus itself was any of my concern. It was absurd and slightly despicable, in the first decade of Thatcher and Reagan, to hear former and actual radicals intone piously against 'the politics of confrontation.' I suppose that, if this collection has a point, it is the desire of one individual to see the idea of confrontation kept alive.
Christopher Hitchens
The habit of looking into the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts.
Bertrand Russell
Zen is a way of liberation concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous but what is.
Alan Watts
She tried to smile sympathetically, but with her face it wasn't quite possible.
Anthony Horowitz
I think one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of belonging to a Church....Of one thing I am certain. The religion of the future will have to be extremely ascetic, and by that I don't mean just going without food and drink.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The speaker calls for a careful examination of Christ's principle of turning the other cheek before we use it as a demand or excuse for total personal pacifism. After all, when literally struck on the cheek, Jesus did question the legitimacy of the authority by which this was done.
John Thackway
If you want a vision of the future, imagine someone watching a boot stamping on a human face - forever...and ‘liking’ it.
Dean Cavanagh
He's an artist in London. We don't see him much."Tom gave him one of his quick, considering glances and asked, "Doesn't he live with you?""No," said Indigo, finally saying out loud what he had known now for a long, long time. "Not really. Not anymore.
Hilary McKay
I think about death sometimes. Analytically, of course.
Lynne Truss
I've hated you for the longest time, but I've loved you for longer." ~ Stefan #5 The Veil Series, Ties That Bind,
Pippa DaCosta
Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true.
J.R.R. Tolkien
If individuals have no virtues their vices may be of use to us.
Junius
The Times is a paper which is seldom found in any hands but those of the highly educated.
Arthur Conan Doyle
I guess, like some guy once said, if triangles invented a god, the chances are high it would have three sides.
Michael Marshall Smith
Pour, varlet, pour the waterThe water steaming hot!A spoonful for each man of usAnother for the pot!
Thomas Babington Macaulay
If there was one thing which Sloan had learned over the years it was that you should never underestimate the element of luck in detective work.
Catherine Aird
Maybe I'm in Hell. That's okay, I'm not scared of Hell - it's just Heaven for bad people.
Steven Moffat
Grief was like a terrible burden, but at least you could lay it down by the side of the road and walk away from it. Antonia had come only a few paces, but already she could turn and look back and not weep. It wasn't anything to do with forgetting. It was just accepting. Nothing was ever so bad once you had accepted it.
Rosamunde Pilcher
Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation foolish preparation?
Jane Austen
The angry person is acutely sensitive to all they are owed by the world, and blind to all they have received
Jules Evans
I think we all mistake certain things for happiness. I think we mistake comfort for happiness and we mistake pleasure for happiness, and entertainment for happiness, when really these are just things we use as proxies for our happiness.We use them to cheer us up or try and achieve brief happiness, when really happiness is something much more profound and long lasting and exists within us.
Simon Pegg
A woman's life can really be a succession of lives each revolving around some emotionally compelling situation or challenge and each marked off by some intense experience.
Wallis Simpson
I mean to say, I know perfectly well that I've got, roughly speaking, half the amount of brain a normal bloke ought to possess. And when a girl comes along who has about twice the regular allowance, she too often makes a bee line for me with the love light in her eyes. I don't know how to account for it, but it is so.""It may be Nature's provision for maintaining the balance of the species, sir.
P.G. Wodehouse
Nothing else in nature behaves so consistently and rigidly as a human being in pursuit of hell.
Pete Townshend
why are trying so hard to fit in, when you're born to stand out
Oliver James
, Stanhope delayed a moment behind Miss Fox to add: "The substantive, of course, governs the adjective; not the other way round.""The substantive?" Pauline asked blankly."Good. It contains terror, not terror good. I'm keeping you. Good-bye, Periel," and he was gone.
Charles Williams
There are different types of salvation." he said, diplomatically. "No." Rena shook him off. "There's only one. In the voice of God, speaking through the space between the stars.
Anne Corlett
If I let a gust of wind or a sprinkling of rain turn me aside from the easy tasks, what preparation would such sloth be for the future I propose myself?
Charlotte Brontë