Quotes by British Authors - Page 128

An act of love that fails is just as much a part of the divine life as an act of love that succeeds for love is measured by its own fullness not by its reception.
Harold Loukes
There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men. Imagine a congress of eminent celebrities such as More Bacon Grotius Pascal Cromwell Bossuet Montesquieu Jefferson Napoleon Pitt etc. The result would be an Encyclopedia of Errors.
Lord Acton
How few are our real wants and how easy is it to satisfy them! Our imaginary ones are boundless and insatiable.
Julius Charles Hare
Isabel is looking at several collections of research journals. 'She would understand the issues if she chose to open one of the volumes, but she knew that there were conversations within which she would never have the time to participate in. And that, of course, was the problem with any large collection of books, whether in a library or a bookshop: one might feel intimidated by the fact that there was simply too many to read and not know where to start.
Alexander McCall Smith
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
C.S. Lewis
When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself.
Julian Barnes
The most considerable difference I note among men is not in their readiness to fall into error but in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable lapses.
Thomas Henry Huxley
He did not know that the Old One was his father, for such a relationship was utterly beyond his understanding, but as he looked at the emaciated body he felt a dim disquiet that was the ancestor of sadness.
Arthur C. Clarke
In the room of holding out an example for imitation, [the nobility] give only a warning to the lower classes of the people, who are taught to despise the boasted pre-eminence of birth, when attached to the meanest actions and most unwarrantable pursuits; and from hence proceeds all the licentiousness and spirit of equality that causes general disturbance.
Eliza Parsons
Dr Power stood up. “Because your staff are not components that can be fitted in, or replaced when they are unpredictable, or when they are simply being human. Because our patients are not playing a game called ‘business’ with profit and loss and winners and losers. Because patients have no choice, but to be patients and it’s our privilege to be in a temporary position where we can help them. And, inevitably, when we ourselves fall ill; when we grow old, then we can only hope that we will receive the help we ourselves need in turn. Because that’s the reality of life. And not some self-aggrandising game". - Dr Power, speaking in The Good Shepherd
Hugh Greene
When you pray for what you most want in the world, its opposite comes along with it. I was given a woman whom I truly loved and who truly loved me. The opposite side of such a love is the pain of its loss. I can only feel such pain today because until yesterday I knew that love.
Salman Rushdie
The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
Julian Barnes
It was strange how fear had gone,now that we knew the worst and had a fighting man by our side.
John Buchan
The true object of all human life is play.
G.K. Chesterton
And in a mad tranceStrike with our spirit's knifeInvulnerable nothingsWe decayLike corpses in a charnelFear & GriefConvulse is & consume usDay by dayAnd cold hopes swarmLike worms withinOur living clay
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Like all fiction, my lies are just my efforts to be truer than the truth.
Johnny Rich
I took the dog out for a walk tonight, and together we wandered across the meadow next door. It was a warm summer's night, dark, and moonless. There were a handful of fireflies flickering intermittently, some so close to me I could see they were burning green as they flew, and some further away, who seemed to be flashing white.And in the sky above them a continual roil of distant summer lightning (the storm distant enough that it was silent) burned and flashed and illuminated the clouds. It seemed as if the lightning bugs were talking to the lightning, in a perfect call and response of flash and counterflash. I watched the sky and the meadow flash and flash while the dog walked ahead of me, and realised that I was perfectly happy...
Neil Gaiman
When a woman walks into a room, her outfit is the first thing she says, before she even opens her mouth. Women are judged on what they wear in a way men would find incomprehensible.
Caitlin Moran
A man can never have too many books. Neither can he have too many fountain pens, hats, fishing rods, waistcoats, tea caddies, paintings or whatever helps him to feel at home in his surroundings and communicate his personality to the world.
Fennel Hudson
Jesus' simple poetic words are delivered casually and gently. Jesus prefers to explain a difficult concept over time, never talking down to His followers, patiently letting the words soak in until they understand them fully.
Roma Downey
Let my worship be within the heart that rejoices, for behold, all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals.Therefore, let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you.
Doreen Valiente
Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.
Muriel Spark
Human history has become too much a matter of dogma taught by 'professionals' in ivory towers as though it's all fact. Actually, much of human history is up for grabs. The further back you go, the more that the history that's taught in the schools and universities begins to look like some kind of faerie story.
Graham Hancock
I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.
Jean Rhys
Sure I am this day we are masters of our fate, that the task which has been set before us is not above our strength; that its pangs and toils are not beyond our endurance. As long as we have faith in our own cause and an unconquerable will to win, victory will not be denied us.
Winston S. Churchill
To satisfy a want or a need, you must first go for it
Martin Powell
Hold material goods and wealth on a flat palm and not in a clenched fist.
Alistair Begg
You have to be ill if you want to get better.
Colin Firth
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
George Orwell
I didn't like it when he looked at me like that. I could never escape the feeling that i was being compared to someone else.
Jojo Moyes
But just as my philosophy had ceased to interest me as soon as it was formulated into a set of principles so, when I saw myself being imitated, I realised at once what an incubus my aesthetic personality might become if I were to be trapped within it. Imitation changes, not the impersonator, but the impersonated.
Peter Ackroyd
If you really want to learn, do not be surprised if someone tries to teach you. And do not lightly reject the method.
Idries Shah
For one crazy moment he had the notion of a vanished tribe of librarians, lost in the deep underground caverns of the Bodleian, a wild and savage tribe that fed on unwary travellers.
Lavie Tidhar
Although the author dealt some of John Bunyan's conclusions in spiritualizing the details of Solomon's Temple, he attributes to Bunyan a "consecrated ingenuity".
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.
Virginia Woolf
A whole Gothic world had come to grief...there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorns had fled...
Evelyn Waugh
Brag is a good dog, but Holdfast is a better.
Charles Dickens
Man is now a horror to God and himself and a creature ill-adapted to the universe not because God made him so but because he has made himself so by the abuse of his free will.
C.S. Lewis
We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.
Lynne Truss
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.
G.K. Chesterton
In fact the bare adjective "bad" hardly scratches the surface of the man's awesome incapacity.
John Biggins
There’s no other way but work, work and work. Read widely, live wildly, plumb the depths of your­self, turn your­self inside out until you find your voice
Claire Meadows
I remember how amazing it felt to be loved my him and how he was all I ever wanted.
Siobhan Davis
Small Man can be a very funny or a very tiresome Tour Companion, depending on how this kind of thing grabs you. He gambles, he drinks too much and he always runs away. Since the Rules allow him to make Jokes, he will excuse his behaviour in a variety of comical ways. Physically he is stunted and not at all handsome, although he usually dresses flamboyantly. He tends to wear hats with feathers in. You will discover he is very vain. But, if you can avoid smacking him, you will come to tolerate if not love him. He will contrive, in some cowardly way, to play a major part in saving the world.
Diana Wynne Jones
Explorers like to pretend that they are a select breed of people with iron nerve and an ability to endure terrible hardship.
Tahir Shah
Count your blessings and be grateful not a great fool.
Habeeb Akande
Tis better to have loved and lost, Than never to have loved at all.
Alfred Tennyson
... Weber insists that one should not give up or lose faith in the face of this struggle. Indeed, he calls for us to engage in, rather than withdraw from, the problems of this world. He reminds us, for example, that while 'successful political action is always the "art of the possible" ... the possible is often reached only by striving to attain the impossible that lies beyond it'.
Nicholas Gane
Good.I need you to be scared.Very,very scared.And then you'll never be scared again.
Simon Holt
I stare out at the real world projected on the windows
Johnny Rich
These days, however, I am much calmer - since I realised that it’s technically impossible for a woman to argue against feminism. Without feminism, you wouldn’t be allowed to have a debate on women’s place in society. You’d be too busy giving birth on the kitchen floor - biting down on a wooden spoon, so as not to disturb the men’s card game - before going back to quick-liming the dunny. This is why those female columnists in the Daily Mail - giving daily wail against feminism - amuse me. They paid you £1,600 for that, dear, I think. And I bet it’s going in your bank account, and not your husband’s. The more women argue loudly, against feminism, the more they both prove it exists and that they enjoy its hard-won privileges.
Caitlin Moran
If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand no doubt we should pity the state of his mind but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first and pity him afterwards.
Samuel Johnson
Sometimes there are people in this world that you meet. Most of these people remain just that, passing acquaintances that further down the line you will struggle to remember their names, let alone picture their faces and it all fades into a distant past almost like a dissolving aspirin. Some acquaintances become friends, but again these come and go with only a few remaining consistent. However, occasionally you will meet someone that changes who you are and who you will become.
Emily Williams
In humanity's relentless drive for convenience and economic growth, we have developed a dangerous level of dependency on networked systems in a very short space of time: in less than two decades, huge parts of the so-called 'critical national infrastructure' (CNI in geekish) in most countries have come under the control of ever more complex computer systems.
Misha Glenny
There is no substitute for experience.
Marilyn L Rice
Such is the facility with which mankind believe at one and the same time things inconsistent with one another, and so few are those who draw from what they receive as truths, any consequences but those recommended to them by their feelings, that multitudes have held the undoubting belief in an Omnipotent Author of Hell, and have nevertheless identified that being with the one best conception they were able to form of perfect goodness.
John Stuart Mill
Moshe was an Israeli with an ear-slitting laugh. He used it in the same way as a madman uses a gun, spraying it around with bewildering randomness.
Alex Garland
The Lord's Prayer may be committed to memory quickly but it is slowly learnt by heart.
Frederick Denison Maurice
Glancing in through the open door to Xav’s room, I saw Zed stretched out on the queen mattress, his arm hugging a pillow as if he felt Sky’s absence at his side.
Joss Stirling
I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.
Anita Brookner