Quotes by British Authors - Page 150

...a being, with a capacity of reasoning, would not have failed to discover, as his faculties unfolded, that true happiness arose from the friendship and intimacy which can only be enjoyed by equals; and that charity is not a condescending distribution of alms, but an intercourse of good offices and mutual benefits, founded on respect for justice and humanity.
Mary Wollstonecraft
He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.
Virginia Woolf
Loneliness clarifies. Here silence standsLike heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends; And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence: Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.
Philip Larkin
But it was just luck really if the girls survived. You're like a man firing a machine gun into a supermarket who happens not to become a murderer.
Iris Murdoch
Needing kindness myself, I am kinder now, and we get on amazingly well. [p. 110]
Lionel Shriver
I didn't totally fit in. I kind of disintegrated around people and became what they wanted me to be. But paradoxically, I felt an intensity inside me all the time. I didn't know what it was, but it kept building, like water behind a dam. Later, when I was properly depressed and anxious, I saw the illness as an accumulation of all that thwarted intensity. A kind of breaking through. As though, if you find it hard enough to let your self be free, your self breaks in, flooding your mind in an attempt to drown all those failed half-versions of you.
Matt Haig
Life is indeed a storm and while there are times you can sit and watch from the safety of a window pane there are moments you need to grit your teeth and take on the wind and the rain.
Ken Scott
God demands a conversion of the mind and heart as the basis of peace and security (cf. Is 26:3), not the superstitious veneration of a stone building or a traditionally sacred site
R.K. Harrison
All the hungers we have for love, for union, for happiness are given by God to lead us to him. The difference between a saint and the greatest sinner is where they go to satisfy that hunger.
Christopher West
I love the fact that Perrault's princess goes on living and struggling after she finds her prince, and that Perrault doesn't shrink from the weirdness of Sleeping Beauty being over a hundred years old but having the body of a lithe young thing. When the prince wakes her, he considers telling her she's wearing the kind of clothes his grandmother used to wear, but decides it's best not to mention it just yet.
Samantha Ellis
Shifting perspective(s) and being proactive are essential to your our life paths, progress and possibilities: "Just because a door appears closed it does not mean that it is locked - nor that it will not open with the right heart, call or touch
Rasheed Ogunlaru
The inertia of a jungle village is a dangerous thing. Before you know it your whole life has slipped by and you are still waiting there.
Tahir Shah
The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.
G.K. Chesterton
When I am alone in the forest at night-time and jump from one tree to another, I often think that life is so strange.
George Mikes
If there is one thing I refuse to do, it is to drown.
Hannah Ashworth
The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one.
James Goldsmith
The canter is a cure for every evil.
Benjamin Disraeli
Hello, Darkness," Caine said.Gaia's face fell. Her bloody, feral grin faded to be replaced by lips drawn right with fear. Her killer blue eyes widened as she looked at Caine who was no longer Caine."Nemesis," Gaia said.
Michael Grant
I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course--the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end.
Douglas Adams
Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.
Dodie Smith
One day you're something, so promising and full o' dares, so big the world's too small a place to hold you. Then, 'fore you know it, you're old, and you realise all them things you had in mind you'll never get to. All them doors you felt too big to fit through have already shut. Only one left open and it leads to nothing but nothing.
Joe Abercrombie
In the busy haunts of men.
Felicia D. Hemans
In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.
Kate Atkinson
Potential, and the will to deploy it. That's all magic is in the end, you know.
Richard K. Morgan
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,Hath had elsewhere its setting,And cometh from afar:Not in entire forgetfulness,And not in utter nakedness,But trailing clouds of glory do we come
William Wordsworth
A man of business may talk of philosophy a man who has none may practise it.
Alexander Pope
Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.No soldier's paid to kick against His powers.We laughed, — knowing that better men would come,And greater wars: when each proud fighter bragsHe wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.
Wilfred Owen
Don't let Ron see what's on those Slytherin's badges," she whispered urgently.Harry looked questioningly at her, but she shook her head warningly; Ron had just ambled over to them, looking lost and desparate."Good luck, Ron," said Hermione, standing on tiptoe and kissing him on the cheek. "And you, Harry --"Ron seemed to come to himself slightly as they walked back across the Great Hall. He touched the spot on his face where Hermione had kissed him, looking puzzled, as though he was not quite sure what had just happened.
J.K. Rowling
Your idea doesn't have to be big. It just has to be yours alone. The more the idea is yours alone, the more freedom you have to do something really amazing. The more amazing, the more people will click with your idea. The more people click with your idea, the more it will change the world.
Hugh MacLeod
Let's forgive someone for Valentines day, it's a great way to show love, and forgive yourself too for the hurt you held onto.
Jay Woodman
A killer on the payroll isn't good for business
L.A. Larkin
Was it possible to find recompense, meaning, connection with others amidst the mess and the muddle ?
Elizabeth Buchan
Not long ago Congress voted, with much patriotic rhetoric, for the imposition of severe penalties upon anyone presuming to burn the flag of the United States. Yet the very Congressmen who passed this law are responsible, by acts of commission or omission, for burning, polluting, and plundering the territory that the flag is supposed to represent. Therein, they exemplified the peculiar andperhaps fatal fallacy of civilization: the confusion of symbol with reality.
Alan W. Watts
[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.
Dorothy L. Sayers
The same word passed through three minds, simultaneously, philosophical, fatalistic, the eternal refuge of the Italian: Pazienza....
Violet Trefusis
Scott glanced at his watch but didn't register what it said. The notion of time had become as absurd as the quietly glowing trees.
R.D. Ronald
What is the quality you most like in a man? The ability to return books.
David Bowie
I collected pictures and I drew pictures and I looked at the pictures by myself. And because no one else ever saw them, the pictures were perfect and true. They were alive.
Helen Oyeyemi
If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed
Alan W. Watts
When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become!
Charles Darwin
Should he give free reign to his desires, the bibliomaniac can ruin his life along with the lives of his loved ones. He'll often take better care of his books than of his own health; he'll spend more on fiction than he does on food; he'll be more interested in his library than in his relationships, and, since few people are prepared to live in a place where every available surface is covered with piles of books, he'll often find himself alone, perhaps in the company of a neglected and malnourished cat. When he dies, all but forgotten, his body might fester for days before a curious neighbor grows concerned about the smell.
Mikita Brottman
He couldn’t see why people made such a fuss about people eating their silly old fruit anyway, but life would be a lot less fun if they didn’t. And there was never an apple, in Adam’s opinion, that wasn’t worth the trouble you got into for eating it.
Neil Gaiman
Immature poets imitate: mature poets steal.
Philip Massinger
The practice is simple. Whatever you're doing, do that with total awareness.
Tony Samara
Faith in Jesus is the most important event in the history of a child’s life.
Elizabeth George
When people speak of great men, they think of men like Napoleon - men of violence. Rarely do they think of peaceful men. But contrast the reception they will receive when they return home from their battles. Napoleon will arrive in pomp and in power, a man who's achieved the very summit of earthly ambition. And yet his dreams will be haunted by the oppressions of war. William Wilberforce, however, will return to his family, lay his head on his pillow and remember: the slave trade is no more.
Charles Fox
Sometimes, on our way through the world, we meet someone who touches our heart in a way others don't.
Philip Reeve
Despite the fact that an Indonesian island chicken has probably had a much more natural life than one raised on a battery farm in England, people who wouldn't think twice about buying something oven-ready become much more upset about a chicken that they've been on a boat with, so there is probably buried in the Western psyche a deep taboo about eating anything you've been introduced to socially.
Douglas Adams
I felt tears pricking inside my eyelids. Maybe I came first With Oliver.
Jacqueline Wilson
Do you wonder that I avow this to you? Know, that in the course of your future life you will often find yourself elected the involuntary confidant of your acquaintances' secrets: people will instinctively find out, as I have done, that it is not your forte to tell of yourself, but to listen while others talk of themselves; they will feel, too, that you listen with no malevolent scorn of their indiscretion, but with a kind of innate sympathy; not the less comforting and encouraging because it is very unobtrusive in its manifestations.""How do you know? -- how can you guess all this, sir?""I know it well; therefore I proceed almost as freely as if I were writing my thoughts in a diary.
Charlotte Brontë
Learn today so that you may live tomorrow
Chris Bradford
Wisdom is a true activity of compassion. And so, meditation is the act of loving kindness. It is the activity where loving kindness is applied on all levels.
Tony Samara
This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.
Neil Gaiman
Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
Samuel Johnson
What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.
George Orwell
My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.
Diane Setterfield
In Buddhism we would say that you are lazy... Despising yourself, thinking you are no good, saying 'I can't do this.' This is the mind of weakness. You must work to overcome it .
David Michie
Courage is the thing. All goes if courage
J.M. Barrie
It's interesting how much you can tell about someone from their friends.
Lindsey Kelk
Eve left Adam to meet the Devil in private.
Alexander Pope