Quotes by British Authors - Page 126

When the evening was over, Anne could not but be amused at the idea of her coming to Lyme, to preach patience and resignation to a young man whom she had never seen before; nor could she help fearing, on more serious reflection, that, like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination.
Jane Austen
A conscience that is forbidden to operate in the choice of goals for economic activity is not conscience in the sense in which any moralist, pagan or Christian, has every understood the term. And the family (which [Michael] Novak regards as vital to the spirit of democratic capitalism) is precisely the place where the noncapitalist values have to be learned, where one is not free to choose his company and where one is not free to pursue self-interest to the limit. Because capitalism pursues the opposite goals - freedom of each individual to choose and pursue his own ends to the limit of his power - the disintegration of marriage and family life is one of the obvious characteristics of advanced capitalist societies.
Lesslie Newbigin
We live in blatantly corrupt times.
Steven Magee
And, conversely, she went on to herself, sneering at the Grand Duke's palace, poverty is wasted on the poor, who never know how to make the best of things, are only the rich without money, are just as useless at looking after themselves, can't handle their cash just like the rich can't, always squandering it on bright, pretty, useless things in just the same way.
Angela Carter
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
Logan Pearsall Smith
You are the most ludicrous excuse for a man I've ever known - but there isn't a centimetre of you that I don't think is perfect.
Lucy Robinson
Remember the Golden Rule? "Treat people as you would like to be treated." The best managers break the Golden Rule every day. They would say don't treat people as you would like to be treated. This presupposes that everyone breathes the same psychological oxygen as you. For example, if you are competitive, everyone must be similarly competitive. If you like to be praised in public, everyone else must, too. Everyone must share your hatred of micromanagement.
Marcus Buckingham
For present-day politicians there are only political points to be made from such statements, and the larger the sin the larger the outrage, the larger the apology and the larger the potential political gain for sorrow expressed. Through such statements political leaders can gain the benefits of magnanimity without the stain of involvement: the person making the apology had done nothing wrong and all the people who could have received the apology are dead.
Douglas Murray
. . . what is thought now, and held to be universal truth, was not thought then, or true of that time.
George MacDonald Fraser
The sun was shining, but Christ had hidden Himself, and all the world was black to you; or it was night, and since the bright and morning star was gone, no other star could yield you so much as a ray of light. What a howling wilderness is this world without our Lord! If once He hideth Himself from us, withered are the flowers of our garden; our pleasant fruits decay; the birds suspend their songs, and a tempest overturns our hopes.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
John Berger
And as I touch your shoulder tonight this room has become the centre of the entire universe.
Jarvis Cocker
Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.
George Orwell
It was hard to disappear completely in Botswana, where there were fewer than two million people and where people had a healthy curiosity as to who was who and where people had come from. It was very difficult to be anonymous, even in Gaborone, as there would always be neighbours who would want to know exactly what one was doing and who one’s people had been.
Alexander McCall Smith
I'm not much of a challenge here in the dark.
Neil Gaiman
Television? The word is half Latin and half Greek. No good can come of it.
C. P. Scott
She gave up trying to understand herself, and the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters — the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue. As the years pass, they are censured. Their pleasantry and their piety show cracks, their wit becomes cynicism, their unselfishness hypocrisy; they feel and produce discomfort wherever they go.
E.M. Forster
The scepticism which men affect towards their higher inspirations is often not an honest doubt, but a guilty negligence, and is a sign of narrow mind and defective wisdom.
James Martineau
Even people whose lives have been made various by learning sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible - nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas - where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.
George Eliot
Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because—what with trolls and dwarfs and so on—speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green.
Terry Pratchett
Words fly like stones into clouds and accelerate....
Jay Woodman
To err is human, to forgive, divine.
Alexander Pope
With faint praises one another damn.
William Wycherley
It’s got fuck all to do with being racist. I don’t care if he’s purple or orange or fucking yellow with pink spots! Although if he’s yellow with pink spots perhaps we should call a first aider. All I care about is his CSCS card and this Home Office card that is now in my possession
Karl Wiggins
You are no longer human, with all those depths and highs and nuances of emotion that define you as a person.There is no feeling any more, because to feel any emotion would also be to beckon the overwhelming blackness from you. My mind has now locked all this down. And without any control of this self-defence mechanism my subconscious has operated. I do not feel any more.
Jake Wood
Well?" said Loki. "What about you, Heimdall? Do you have any suggestions?""I do," said Heimdall. "But you won't like it."Thor banged his fist down upon the table. "It does not matter whether or not we like it," he said. "We are gods! There is nothing that any of us gathered here would not do to get back Mjollnir, the hammer of the gods. Tell us your idea, and if it is a good idea, we will like it.""You won't like it," said Heimdall."We will like it!" said Thor."Well," said Heimdall, "I think we should dress Thor as a bride. Have him put on the necklace of the Brisings. Have him wear a bridal crown. Stuff his dress so he looks like a woman. Veil his face. We'll have him wear keys that jingle, as women do, drape him with jewels -""I don't like it!" said Thor. "People will think... well, for a start they'll think I dress up in women's clothes. Absolutely out of the question. I don't like it. I am definitely not going to be wearing a bridal veil. None of us like this idea, do we? Terrible, terrible idea. I've got a beard. I can't shave off my beard.""Shut up, Thor," said Loki son of Laufey. "It's an excellent idea.
Neil Gaiman
And at the closing of the dayShe loosed the chain, and down she lay;The broad stream bore her far away,The Lady of Shallot.
Alfred Tennyson
The notion that I had walked twelve hundred miles since Rotterdam filled me with a legitimate feeling of something achieved. But why should the thought that nobody knew where I was, as though I were in flight from bloodhounds or from worshipping corybants bent on dismemberment, generate such a feeling of triumph? It always did.
Patrick Leigh Fermor
Never tell an unnecessary lie; the truth has great authority. The cleverest murders have been caught, not because they told the one essential lie, but because they continued to lie about unimportant detail when the truth could have done them no harm.
P.D. James
The traveller's-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know one must be an actor as well as a spectator.
Aldous Huxley
But there was more to it than that. As the Amazing Maurice said, it was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were, and who were the rats.
Terry Pratchett
He's wearing his official university sweatshirt again, which puzzles me a little. I mean I'd sort of understand it more if it said Yale or Harvard or something, because then it would be a fashion choice. But why advertise the fact that you're at a university to all the other people who are at the university with you?
David Nicholls
The most wonderful of all things in life is the discovery of another human being with whom one's relationship has a growing depth beauty and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of divine accident and the most wonderful of all things in life.
Hugh Walpole
If those at your top are weak, your bottom will be rotten
Benny Bellamacina
How, then, does the written word work? What part of a reader absorbs it - or should that be a double question: what part of a reader absorbs what part of a text? I think that underneath, or alongside, a reader's conscious response to a text, whatever is needy in him is taking in whatever the text offers to assuage that need.
Diana Athill
He may have as strong a sense of what would be right, as you can have, without being so equal under particular circumstances to act up to it.""Then, it would not be so strong a sense. If it failed to produce equal exertion, it could not be an equal conviction.
Jane Austen
Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
I tell you I can't be bothered with things like that. I've got a soul above buttons.
George Orwell
It's over, Sam. Finally.""Yeah," he said. "I guess it is.""Turn out the light, Sam."Sam reached for the switch and turned out the light.
Michael Grant
The thought manifests the word;The word manifests the deed;The deed develops into habit;And habit hardens into character;So watch the thought and its ways with care,And let them spring forth from loveBorn out of compassion for all beings.As the shadow follows the body, as we think, so we become.
Juan Mascaró
Sandals. The Sufi teacher Ghulam-Shah was asked what pattern he used in formulating his courses for disciples. He said: 'Barefoot until you can get sandals, sandals until you can manage boots.
Idries Shah
If we are to talk in the language of social constructions, then the construction of the very concepts of the social and the biological must also be elucidated.
Denise Riley
I dislike Tolkien, another Oxonian Old Norse obsessive, with his war games and made-up language in a world without women.
Sarah Moss
What do you consider the most interesting man-made structure in the galaxy?The dam they are building at the Three Gorges on the Yangtse. Though perhaps '“baffling'” would be a better word. Dams almost never do what they were intended to do, but create devastation beyond belief. And yet we keep on building them, and I can'’t help but wonder why. I'’m convinced that if we go back far enough in the history of the human species, we will find some beaver genes creeping in there somewhere. It'’s the only explanation that makes sense.
Douglas Adams
GOD IS YOUR THOUGHTS
Colin Tegerdine
Hope – or perhaps delusion – was a flame that had stayed lit, even though its scorching light would hurt. It had refused to go out.
Dianna Hardy
For many people, a western lifestyle equates to living in a toxic home, working a toxic job, eating toxic food, being sick from your thirties onward and eventually dying from preventable disease.
Steven Magee
My people, we stay indoors. We have keyboards. We have darkness.
Neil Gaiman
The discovery in art is often gradual, a process of minor discoveries riddled with uncertainties and the potential for making that which is discovered vanish before your eyes, like a mirage.
Geoff Dyer
I have noticed that what cats most appreciate in a human being is not the ability to produce food - which they take for granted - but his or her entertainment value. Asmodeus took to his toy enthusiastically. In another week he permitted me to stroke him, producing a raucous purr, but, in order to save his face, pretending to be asleep.
Geoffrey Household
Every person is an island in the sea of humanity.
Anthony T.Hincks
There are one hundred men seeking security to one able man who is willing to risk his fortune.
J. Paul Getty
Godshawk looked surprised, the way that people generally do when you ask them philosophical questions in shrubberies in the middle of the night.
Philip Reeve
We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places -- retreated to most often when we are most remote from them -- are among the most important landscapes we possess.
Robert Macfarlane
Potter, you can skin Malfoy's shrivelfig.
J.K. Rowling
She wanted to say, I am made of smoke. My mind is smoke, my thoughts are smoke, I am all smoke and only smoke. This body is a garment I put on, which by my magic art I have made capable of functioning as a human body functions, it's so biologically perfect that it can conceive children and pop them out in threes, fours and fives. Yet I am not of this body and could, if I chose, inhabit another woman, or an antelope, or a gnat. Aristotle was wrong, for I have lived for aeons, and altered by body when I chose, like a garment of which I had grown tired. The mind and the body are two, she wanted to say, but she knew it would disappoint him to be disagreed with, so she held her tongue.
Salman Rushdie
…I have never seen mountains before, and they fill me and oppress me so much that I could not sleep; I must keep awake this first night, and see that they don’t fall on the earth and overwhelm it." [- Miss Benson to her brother, Thurstan]
Elizabeth Gaskell
[W]hen trying to understand the character of the modern mind, it is impossible to separate the effects of genes and the developmental environment.
Steven Mithen
Several times he had to flatten himself against the shelves as a thesaurus thundered by. He waited patiently as a herd of Critters crawled past, grazing on the contents of the choicer books and leaving behind them piles of small slim volumes of literary criticism.
Terry Pratchett
She had never really listened to anyone in her life; which, some said, was why she had survived.
G.K. Chesterton