Quotes by British Authors - Page 753

If he was not exactly a Spartan, he was, you might say, spartanatical. Things happened to you; they were good,or they were bad - and that was the truth about everything.
A.E. Coppard
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
G.K. Chesterton
We are no longer happy so soon as we wish to be happier.
Walter Savage Landor
Who can refute a sneer?
William Paley
You are quite wrong about him," Felix had said. "He has not been atan English school, or English university, and therefore is not like other young men that you know; but he is, I think, well educated and clever. As for conceit, what man will do any good who is notconceited? Nobody holds a good opinion of a man who has a low opinionof himself.""All the same, my dear fellow, I do not like Lucius Mason.
Anthony Trollope
No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way... To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.
Henry Gee
And I know an eighteenth charm, and that charm is the greatest of all, and that charm I can tell no man, for a secret that no one knows but you is the most powerful secret there can ever be.
Neil Gaiman
Those of us who have the luck to enjoy good health forget about this vast parallel universe of the unwell-their daily miseries, their banal ordeals. Only when you cross that frontier into the world of ill-health do you recognize its quiet, massive presence, its brooding permanence.
William Boyd
But you can't be too careful of these strange new ideas and new things. You must not tamper with them. If you try to understand them, they may entangle and get hold of you, and then where will you be? Hide your mind from them, and hide them from your mind. Stick to the plain common sense of life. There will always be a tomorrow rather like today. At least so far there always has been a fairly similar tomorrow. Once or twice lately there have been jolts... Try not to notice these jolts. 'It is no good meeting trouble halfway.
H.G.Wells
The man who said, "Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed," put the eulogy quite inadequately and even falsely. The truth "Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised." The man who expects nothing sees redder roses than common men can see, and greener grass, and a more startling sun. Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall possess the cities and the mountains; blessed is the meek, for he shall inhereit the earth. Until we realize that things might not be we cannot realize that things are.
G.K. Chesterton
Her book has perhaps been a good one; it has refreshed, refilled, rewarmed her heart; it has set her brain astir, furnished her mind with pictures.
Charlotte Brontë
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.
George Orwell
Honesty is nothing more than a party trick, and you know how much I love to dance.
Elizabeth Brooks
No matter the languages we speak or the colour of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who laboured to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu.
Adam Rutherford
Follow through.Make your dreams come true.Don't give up the fight.You will be alright.Cause there's no one like you in the universe
Muse
He is a man, I think," he said, "who cares for nothing but a joke. He is a dangerous man."Lambert laughed in the act of lifting some macaroni to his mouth."Dangerous!" he said. "You don't know little Quin, sir!""Every man is dangerous," said the old man, without moving, "Who cares only for one thing. I was once dangerous myself.
G.K. Chesterton
Destiny smells of dust and the libraries of the night.
Neil Gaiman
Poor Cook, thought Captain, I must be kinder to her. She makes a splendid pet. How faithful she is! I always say you can't get the same love from a dog that you can from a human. So clever, too. I believe she understands every word I say. I believe they have souls, just like dogs. It's uncanny how canine a human can be, if you are kind to them and treat them well. I know for a fact that when some dogs in history died, their humans lay down on the grave and howled all night and refused food and pined away. It was just instinct, of course, not real intelligence, but all the same it makes you think. I believe that when a human does, it goes to a special heaven for humans, with kind dogs to look after it.
T.H. White
The best thing to do when someone is trying to argue with you is to repeatedly state "Stay Away" and video record the entire event. You may need that video for the police afterwords when the aggressor starts fabricating fantasies about the event.
Steven Magee
An intelligent man is one who acknowledges his intelligence as that of those who surround him.
Ilyas Kassam
The gods demand entertainment. They demand trial and contest. We could not be allowed to defeat our own daemons, for that would be boring, and boredom is the only thing the eternals fear. We are being lined up, one by one, to tear at each other's throats. I do not think they wish to see a victor. I think they wish us to fight forever, locked in madness until the universe's end
Chris Wraight
Finallya day will come whenwoken by the xylophoneof sunthroughblindsyou’ll realisethat the beach was not the placewhere horses tore the sandto ribbonthat the scent of him has liftedfrom the last of the sheetsthat he isn’t coming backthat it hasn’t rainedbut the birds are pretending that it hasso they can sing
Andrew McMillan
The black bird cocked its head to one side, and then said, in a voice like stones being struck, 'You shadow man.''I'm Shadow,' said Shadow. The bird hopped up onto the fawn's rump, raised its head, ruffled its crown and neck feathers. It was enormous and its eyes were black beads. There was something intimidating about a bird that size, this close.'Says he will see you in Kay-ro.' tokked the raven. Shadow wondered which of Odin's ravens this was: Huginn or Munnin, Memory or Thought.'Kay-ro?' he asked.'In Egypt.''How am I going to go to Egypt?''Follow Mississippi. Go south. Find Jackal.''Look,' said Shadow, 'I don't want to seem like I'm-- Jesus, look...' he paused. Regrouped. He was cold, standing in a wood, talking to a big black bird who was currently brunching on Bambi. 'Okay. What I'm trying to say is I don't want mysteries.''Mysteries,' agreed the bird helpfully.'What I want is explanations. Jackal in Kay-ro. This does not help me. It's a line from a bad spy thriller.
Neil Gaiman
God believes in you. So why don't you?
Anthony T.Hincks
The intensity of the love of the upright is not so much to be judged by what it appears as by what the upright long for. It is our daily lament that we cannot love enough.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
However it—or the kind of extreme individualistic epistemology it embraces—can lead historians to an overly skeptical approach particularly to those sources that were intended to recount and inform events of the past, that is, testimony in this restricted sense. Particularly in Gospels scholarship there is an attitude abroad that approaches the sources with fundamental skepticism, rather than trust, and therefore requires that anything the sources claim be accepted only if historians can independently verify it…..
Richard Bauckham
Sometimes the fog in his eyes would clear, that fog caused by the pain and the killers of pain, and when it cleared, I saw regret and fear in those eyes swimming with tears and I was convinced that this was it, this was the end, this was surely the end.
Tony Parsons
The essential quality of a market system, contrary to popular thinking, is not that it promotes greed; but rather, that it renders greed harmless.
Israel M. Kirzner
There is no sound more annoying than the chatter of a child, and none more sad than the silence they leave when they are gone.
Mark Lawrence
USA schools know that computer electromagnetic interference (EMI) emissions, WiFi and campus cell towers are radiation poisoning the children and the government is determined to keep on doing it.
Steven Magee
I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It's full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being 'objective.' Nostalgia for what? I don't know. Because I'd rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the 'Anna' of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
Doris Lessing
I would agree with your statement that many of my protagonists are outsiders. I wonder if we all are, and even people who don't think they are, and they're just better at masking it. When we shut our bedroom door at night, however well-integrated we think we are with the rest of society, maybe there's something illusory about that...
David Mitchell
If we cannot prevail with men for God, we will at least endeavor to prevail with God for men.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
That innate love of melody, which she had inherited from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times.
Thomas Hardy
We've strayed into a zone with a high magical index,' he said. 'Don't ask me how. Once upon a time a really powerful magic field must have been generated here, and we're feeling the after-effects.'Precisely,' said a passing bush.
Terry Pratchett
Life is essentially a series of events to be lived through rather than intellectual riddles to be played with and solved.
George A. Buttrick
I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.
Bertrand Russell
When the waterholes were dry, people sought to drink at the mirage.
Evelyn Waugh
I have nothing to offer but blood toil tears and sweat.
Winston Churchill
You do care. You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.
J.K. Rowling
My true-love hath my heart and I have his, By just exchange one for the other given: I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss; There never was a bargain better driven.
Philip Sidney
It's all chop-change chop-change with you. Either go out with me and treat me nicely, or leave me alone. As I say, I am not interested in fuckwittage.
Helen Fielding
There is no study that is not capable of delighting us, after a little application to it.
Alexander Pope
Some people regard discipline as a chore. For me it is a kind of order that sets me free to fly.
Julie Andrews
All men are liable to error and most men are ... by passion or interest under temptation to it.
John Locke
Today everybody admits that something is wrong with the world, and the critics of Christianity are the very people who feel this most. The most violent attacks on religion come from those who are most anxious to change the world, and they attack Christianity because they think that it is an obstructive force that stands in the way of a real reform of human life. There has seldom been a time in which men were more dissatisfied with life and the more conscious of the need for deliverance, and if they turn away from Christianity it is because they feel that Christianity is a servant of the established order and that it has no real power or will to change the world and to rescue man from his present difficulties. They have lost their faith in the old spiritual traditions that inspired civilization in the past, and they tend to look for a solution in some external practical remedy such as communism, or the scientific organisation of life; something definite and objective that can be applied to society as a whole.
Christopher Henry Dawson
Creating our own realities is nothing new, but now it’s easier than ever to become trapped in echo chambers of our own making.
Jamie Bartlett
But Dobby shouted, "You shall not harm Harry Potter! ... He got up, face livid, and pulled out his wand, but Dobby raised a long, threatening finger. "You shall go now," he said fiercely, pointing down at Mr. Malfoy. "You shall not touch Harry Potter. You shall go now.
J.K. Rowling
And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
C.S. Lewis
When I lost you...my world darkened beyond any known shade of black, and the only light that I have seen since is you...
Tracey-anne McCartney
If you don't value yourself, you're not going to draw valuable things into your life.
Robert Tew
It seemed to me an odd view to take - rather as if one should protest that one didn't LIKE the idea of dying or being born. I preferred the notion of finding out first how it would be, and then doing what one could about the parts of it one disliked most.
John Wyndham
We had deluded ourselves that perhaps peace might find the Arabs able, unhelped and untaught, to defend themselves with paper tools. Meanwhile we glozed our fraud by conducting their necessary war purely and cheaply. But now this gloss had gone from me. Chargeable against my conceit were the causeless, ineffectual deaths of Hesa. My will had gone and I feared to be alone, lest the winds of circumstance, or power, or lust, blow my empty soul away.
T.E. Lawrence
We fly, but we have not 'conquered' the air. Nature presides in all her dignity, permitting us the study and the use of such of her forces as we may understand. It is when we presume to intimacy, having been granted only tolerance, that the harsh stick fall across our impudent knuckles and we rub the pain, staring upward, startled by our ignorance.
Beryl Markham
The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you
Neil Gaiman
Will you walk into my parlour?" said the Spider to the Fly
Mary Howitt
Listen, Harr,y can I have a go on it? Can I?""I don't think anyone should ride that broom just yet!" said Hermoine shrilly.Harry and Ron looked at her."What d'you think Harry's going to do with it - sweep the floor?" said Ron.
J.K. Rowling
Take a pinch of snuff, doctor, and acknowledge that I have scored over you in your example.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Music first and last should sound well should allure and enchant the ear. Never mind the inner significance.
Thomas Beecham
why are we here?where do we come from?traditionally,these are questionsfor philosophy,but philosophy is dead
Stephen Hawking