Quotes by British Authors - Page 11

In every living thing there is the desire for love.
D.H. Lawrence
To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God.
William Temple
Eden Fruitarianism is the solution to the dilemma of the screaming carrot.
Mango Wodzak
Since we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our minds, it is our duty to furnish it well.
Peter Ustinov
That sign of old age extolling the past at the expense of the present.
Sydney Smith
The vision of her own personality, of herself as a real everlasting thing, different from anything else, unmergeable, like the sea or the wind, flashed into Rachel's mind, and she became profoundly excited at the thought of living.
Virginia Woolf
Cheat? Good heavens, this is an amateur cricket match amongst leading prep schools, I'm an Englishman and a schoolmaster supposedly setting an example to his young charges. We are playing the most artistic and beautiful game ever devised. Of course I'll cunting well cheat. Now, give me my robe and put on my crown. I have immortal longings in me.
Stephen Fry
I am an atheist, but as far as blowing up the world in a nuclear war goes, I tell them not to worry.
Fred Hoyle
Newton's work on gravity led to the discovery of the Lagrange point, a place where opposing forces cancel one another out, and a body may remain at relative rest. This is where I am right now; the forces in my life confound one another. Better, for the moment, to be here and now, without history or future.
Nick Harkaway
The profoundest of all sensualitiesis the sense of truthand the next deepest sensual experienceis the sense of justice.
D.H. Lawrence
Since when did books ever solve anything? They only raise more questions than they answer, otherwise they’re just fucking entertainment, and I am not here to fucking entertain you.
Zia Haider Rahman
In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics.
Bertrand Russell
I refuse to admit I'm more than fifty-two even if that does make my sons illegitimate.
Lady Nancy Astor
Silence fell like a hammer made of feathers. It left holes in the shape of the sound of the sea.
Terry Pratchett
We have been cut off from our souls in the West, and because romantic love has become our religion, we think we can find fulfillment through this extraordinary and powerful force that draws us into an illusion of permanence. Passion makes us feel alive, makes us sing, makes us feel in touch with something powerful and wonderful, just as it would if we followed this meaning in life in a more spiritual practice. In the West it is often through such relationships, through another human being, that we search desperately for something, not knowing it is to be found within ourselves.
Sarah Bartlett
Whatever you just thought of, I’m not doing it.” Egg
Jamie Scallion
We need a temporary cessation in people having any opinions about any women, ever. I propose a, say, five-year moratorium on having opinions about women, in order to let one generation of girls get from one side of puberty to the other without growing up in a climate where women are constantly being scolded, chivvied, harassed, or subjected to thunderous opinion columns concluding that, yet again, some woman in the public eye has overreached herself and should wind her neck in.
Caitlin Moran
We must delight in each other, make others conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.
John Winthrop
Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the least. They always continue to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to have their share of vexation; and it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life.
Jane Austen
The rest were nondescript, as yet undifferentiated—yet nondescripts, thought Harriet, were the most difficult of all human beings to analyze. You scarcely knew they were there, until—bang! Something quite unexpected blew up like a depth charge and left you marveling, to collect strange floating debris.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Talk of solitude (...). It is the last resort of the civilised: our souls are so creased and soured in meaning we can only unfold them when we are alone. (5/4/1927 - From a Letter to Vita Sackville-West)
Virginia Woolf
Proof is boring. Proof is tiresome. Proof is an irrelevance. People would far rather be handed an easy lie than search for a difficult truth, especially if it suits their own purposes.
Joe Abercrombie
Unfortunately, since there was only one of him, most of his riches were wasted.
Jon Courtenay Grimwood
You have touched me more profoundly than I thought even you could have touched me - my heart was full when you came here today. Henceforward I am yours for everything.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don't have any kids yourself.
Philip Larkin
The curly red lines across the African deserts had the fascination of a magnet, and I hoped fervently that the pioneers who were writing their names over the blank spaces, would leave just one small desert for me.
Rosita Forbes
I don't see how a man is to be good for much unless he has some one woman to love him dearly.
George Eliot
It remains to mention some of the ways in which people have spoken misleadingly of logical form. One of the commonest of these is to talk of 'the logical form' of a statement; as if a statement could never have more than one kind of formal power; as if statements could, in respect of their formal powers, be grouped in mutually exclusive classes, like animals at a zoo in respect of their species. But to say that a statement is of some one logical form is simply to point to a certain general class of, e.g., valid inferences, in which the statement can play a certain role. It is not to exclude the possibility of there being other general classes of valid inferences in which the statement can play a certain role
Peter Frederick Strawson
The myth of purgatory is an allegory, a projection, from the present on to the future. This is why purgatory appeals to the imagination. It is our story. It is where we are now. If we are Christians, if we believe in the risen Jesus as Lord, if we are baptized members of his body, then we are passing right now through the sufferings which form the gateway to life.
N.T. Wright
The way out is never through yourself.
Matt Haig
Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards–their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble–the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.
Virginia Woolf
They stuff people’s heads down the toilet the first day at Stonewall,” he told Harry. “Want to come upstairs and practice?”“No, thanks,” said Harry. “The poor toilet’s never had anything as horrible as your head down it — it might be sick.” Then he ran, before Dudley could work out what he’d said.
J.K. Rowling
Men are all the same. They always think that something they are going to get is better than what they have got.
John Oliver Hobbes
The notion of dream interpretation far antedates the birth of psychoanalysis, and probably served an important function in most, if not all, historical societies. In having lost this function, modern man has also lost the best part of his nature, which he obliviously passes on to the next generation of dreamers.
Neel Burton
All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own,' said Birbal, 'and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.
Salman Rushdie
Wisdom you speak, Obi Tina.''None of that - I'm the one who gets to speak backwards - no, we're both wrong - that's the little green guy, Yoda.''You're right. So I just get to pout and act badly when you try and teach me anything.''Try channelling Luke rather than Annakin - the outcome is better.
Joss Stirling
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
By simple common sense I don't believe in God, in none.
Charlie Chaplin
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
Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in ... the
Will Self
Hail fellow well meet on the highway to madness. Madness is a small town very far away. Most of us, at some point, find we probably could walk there. Others have a road cave in and dump them there.
Helen Slavin
It's funny that being human means so many things, man made divisions counter our judgements towards being wary of the "other", this is worrying because the thing that unites us is being human that is what we all are and without lament but with joy we should embrace everybody we would then live in utopia of diversity.
Paul Isaacs
Is she always like this?" "No, usually worse.
Steve Voake
It's better to make the wrong choice," my father had continued, "than to make no choice at all.
Bernard Cornwell
Gar taldin ni jaonyc; gar sa buir, ori'wadaasla. (Nobody cares who your father was, only the father you'll be.) - Mandalorian saying
Karen Traviss
We don't rise to the level of our abilities, we fall to the level of our excuses
Peter James
The discovery of the telephone has made us acquainted with many strange phenomena. It has enabled us, amongst other things, to establish beyond a doubt the fact that electric currents actually traverse the earth's crust. The theory that the earth acts as a great reservoir for electricity may be placed in the physicist's waste-paper basket, with phlogiston, the materiality of light, and other old-time hypotheses.
William Henry Preece
To wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect
Jane Austen
One minute I was playing chess and doing maths all the time, the next I had been rerouted into more 'normal' girls' activities: reading, writing stories and worrying about my clothes.
Scarlett Thomas
But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.
Mark Haddon
But don’t ever let me hear those words leave those beautifully pink lips of yours.” He warned her playfully. “Evo’s just fine.
L.J. Sealey
Facebook has been spreading across the continents faster than a highly contagious Asian bird flu!
Gemini Adams
She faces him, trying to take a breath that's long and level, trying to pull all the slopping emotions back inside so he won't see them in her face.
M.R. Carey
Well, everything's a lesson, isn't it? Learning all the time, as you could say.
Anthony Burgess
We need new friends. Some of us are cannibals who have eaten their old friends up others must have ever-renewed audiences before whom to re-enact an ideal version of their lives.
Logan Pearsall Smith
We should always be grateful for the faults in our partner because if they didn't have those faults from the start, they would have been able to marry someone much better than us
Ajahn Brahm
Intercessory prayer is exceedingly prevalent. What wonders it has wrought! The Word of God teems with its marvelous deeds. Believer, thou hast a mighty engine in thy hand, use it well, use it constantly, use it with faith, and thou shalt surely be a benefactor to thy brethren.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
And the people of Ankh-Morpork are so thirsty for novelty that the whole city is, you might say, hurrying the future along for the sheer joy of watching its progress.
Terry Pratchett
The experience of history should lead us to hope and strive to make the world better, not to despair and resign ourselves to fate.
Alan Beattie
Men were foolish and were made only so that they should die, while mountains and rivers went on for ever and did not notice the passing of time.
Roald Dahl