Quotes by British Authors - Page 129

If I had one sermon to preach, it would be a sermon against Pride. The more I see of existence...the more I am convinced of the reality of the old religious thesis, that all evil began with some attempt at superiority; some moment when, as we might say, the very skies were cracked across like a mirror, because there was a sneer in Heaven.
G.K. Chesterton
And I saw her as a sad thirtieth child of Valentine that fell, not as Lucifer rebelling against God, but because she too passionately wanted to be united with him! All things in excess become sin.
Lawrence Durrell
My philosophical heart will not judge thee
Benny Bellamacina
The busiest man is the happiest man.
Sir Theodore Martin
And I saw you and I thought, she'd be a cosy fit inside my arm.
Bryn Hammond
If I really seem vain, it is that I am only vain in my ways—not in my heart. The worst women are those vain in their hearts, and not in their ways.
Thomas Hardy
The difference between one man and another is not mere ability ... it is energy.
Thomas Arnold
Worry is evidence of an ill-controlled brain it is merely a stupid waste of time in unpleasantness.
Arnold Bennett
Here lies the challenge in finding good salespeople. You need excellent empathizers who aren't so empathetic they can't close a sale. And you need people with strong ego needs who can still take a moment to figure out what another person wants. They must be aggressive enough to close, but not so aggressive they put people off. Too much empathy and you'll be a nice guy finishing last. Too much ego drive and you'll be scorching earth everywhere you go. Not enough of either and you shouldn't be in sales at all. It's a miracle anyone can do this job.
Philip Delves Broughton
But we do not choose our deaths. The Norns do that at the foot of Yggdrasil and I imagined one of those three Fates holding the shears above my thread. She was ready to cut, and all that mattered now was to keep tight hold of my sword so that the winged women would take me to Valhalla's feasting-hall.
Bernard Cornwell
If you want to strengthen an enemy and make him exult - hate him.
Idries Shah
Thinking is a tiring process; it is much easier to accept beliefs passively than to think them out, rigorously questioning their grounds by asking what are the consequences that follow from them.
L. Susan Stebbing
I've never wanted more, until I met you.
E.L. James
There are few moments of clarity more profound than those that follow the emptying of an overcharged bladder. The world slows down, the focus sharpens, the brain comes back on line. Huge nebulous difficulties prove on close calm examination to be merely cloud giants.
Tom Holt
[On David Hume]Although he never admitted to being an atheist as such, he was clearly and unquestionably the most vividly elegant skeptic of them all.
Jonathan Miller
We can't stop reading. Compulsively we find ourselves reading significance into dreams (we construct a science upon it); into tea-leaves and the fall of cards. We look up at the shifting vapours in the sky, and see faces, lost cities, defeated armies. Isolated in the dark, with nothing to hear and no surfaces to touch, we hallucinate reading-matter. Our craving becomes generalized – for 'the meaning of life'. If we lived alone in a featureless desert we should learn to place the individual grains of sand in a moral or aesthetic hierarchy. We should long to find the greatest grain of sand in the world, and even (in order to find a fixed point of orientation in time as well as in space) the all-time greatest grain of sand; the grain of sand whose discovery changed our whole understanding of grains of sand for ever.
Michael Frayn
In 1829 Rossini was at an age which has often proven critical in the lives of musicians, painters and writers. Lapses into silence far more complete than Rossini's, creative failures, suicides, and unanticipated deaths have been common in the middle to late 30s. As Charles Rosen has noted, 'It is the age when the most fluent composer begins to lose the ease of inspiration he once possessed, when even Mozart had to make sketches and to revise'.
Richard Osborne
Life is like the sea. Its tides and currents sometimes take a man to distant shores that he never dreamed existed
Jocelyn Murray
Installing massive amounts of wireless devices into every city may eventually be proven to be a global weather modification system.
Steven Magee
A book, for the Sufis, is an instrument as much as it is something to give information.
Idries Shah
Being a person is respect, because you're not a cat or a dog or a bunch of tulips, you're a human person and humanness isn't like something there can be different amounts of, it's maxed out from the start, total respect every time - kill one, kill a trainload, you're dissing the transcendental is all.
Tom Stoppard
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
Life,” said Marvin dolefully, “loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it.
Douglas Adams
Darling Daddy,Poor Saffy. She had a big fight in the boys toilets on Monday, did you know? A very big fight and Sarah helped and it was terrifying. Said a boy in my class who has a brother who was there.Saffy washed her hands and said Never Ever Never Dare You Touch My Brother. (Indigo). And the plug holes were blocked with hair.Love from Rose.-Sarah's mother has given us soup. Soup soup soup and then it was all gone.L.F.R.
Hilary McKay
Some are born leaders, some achieve leadership, and some have leadership thrust upon them. Which of these are you, or would you rather not bother?
Maurice Flanagan
This was a lucky recollection -- it saved her from something like regret.
Jane Austen
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 knew today was gonna be bad, but I never got close to this
Ian Ayris
You wanted a peaceful, comfortable Christmas, with all reminders of poverty, injustice, or other people's griefs well out of sight, so as not to disturb your pleasure. That isn't what Christmas is about, Wallace. Christmas is about offering hope to all people, not just those like ourselves. Christmas is about everyone: rich or poor, friend or stranger. The moment you exclude anyone, you exclude yourself.
Anne Perry
Even when you think things can never move forward and you feel so low, there's always a way out.
Katie Piper
Time is the greatest and longest-established spinner of all. ... His factory is a secret place his work noiseless and his hands are mutes.
Charles Dickens
There's no safety in love. You risk the whole of life. But the great thing is to risk -to believe, and to risk everything for your belief.
Elizabeth von Arnim
Well, if pirates are bad,And vampires are worse,Then I pray that as long as I beThat though I sing of VampiratesI never one shall see.Yea, if pirates are dangerAnd vampires are death,I'll extend my prayer for thee-That thine eyes never see a Vampirate...and they never lay a hand on thee
Justin Somper
I seeIn many an eye that measures meThe mortal sickness of a mindToo unhappy to be kind.Undone with misery, all they canIs to hate their fello
A.E. Housman
To Succeed, you must reach for the stars, and let your imagination find its own path
Tahir Shah
I just rearrange words into a pleasing order for money.
Terry Pratchett
Friendship often ends in love but love in friendship - never.
Charles Caleb Colton
What will you do now with the gift of your left life?
Carol Ann Duffy
To her credit, though, Trace didn't lose her famous temper, not at that moment. At eighteen she was already expert at the older woman's art of fermenting rage, conserving it, for later use.
Zadie Smith
Top question of the dying: "What made me sick?
Steven Magee
To be a good diarist one must have a little snouty sneaky mind.
Harold Nicolson
The House of Lords is a model of how to care for the elderly.
Frank Field
He hadn't been this nervous since the last disastrous night at the improv, and he firmly told himself to calm down as he blotted at the tablecloth, glancing upwards to see Emma wriggling out of her summer jacket, pushing her shoulders back and her chest forward in that way that women do without realising the ache they cause.
David Nicholls
For the briefest of moments his eyes sparkled before dimming again. “However much I would love to get into a discussion about chastity belts, now is not the time. The people we were fighting were not human in the strictest sense of the word.
Michelle Smart
All laughing comes from misapprehension. Rightly looked at there is no laughable thing under the sun.
Thomas Hardy
It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored in climate that seem to me the happiest but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both.
T.S Eliot
Maybe we're all ongoing stories, defined at various stages of life, or whenever people oblige us to declare ourselves. Fiction is marvelous for studying this, allowing the writer and reader to leap decades in a sentence. No other art lets you bend time as much.
Tom Rachman
Newt Scamander : "My philosophy is that worrying means you suffer twice.
J.K. Rowling
Not all of Derrida's writing is to everyone's taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: 'What is it, to speak? How can I even speak of this? Who is this "I" who speaks of speaking?
Terry Eagleton
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
John Lubbock
And for all the richest and most successful merchants life inevitably became rather dull and niggly, and they began to imagine that this was therefore the fault of the worlds they'd settled on.
Douglas Adams
For axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses.
John Keats
Pleasure, in itself harmless, may become mischievous, by endearing to us a state which we know to be transient and probatory, and withdrawing our thoughts from that of which every hour brings us nearer to the beginning, and of which no length of time will bring us to the end. Mortification is not virtuous in itself, nor has any other use, but that it disengages us from the allurements of sense. In the state of future perfection, to which we all aspire, there will be pleasure without danger, and security without restraint.
Samuel Johnson
One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.
Alain de Botton
All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shriveled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut.
Anne Brontë
In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.
Charles Darwin
Make us happy and you make us good.
Robert Browning
If you keep wanting to get back in the nest, you're missing the amazing experience of coming out to play at life for a while.
Jay Woodman
You don’t come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn’t a strong aspect of your personality. 'A reality shaped around your own desires' — there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
Zadie Smith
The consensus seemed to be that if really large numbers of men were sent to storm the mountain, then enough might survive the rocks to take the citadel. This is essentially the basis of all military thinking.
Terry Pratchett