Quotes by British Authors - Page 160

Extreme night shift work in high altitude astronomy is easily avoidable by using a split night shift where the first night shift starts before sunset and finishes at midnight and the second night shift starts with a new fresh person working through to after sunrise.
Steven Magee
In the midst of aches in the joints, anxiety over the payment of bills, concern for the safety of those you love, envy of the rich, fear of robbers, dog-weariness at the end of a long day, and the unacceptable slipping away of youth, there does occasionally appear, like a ray of light piercing the clouds, a moment of joy. Perhaps you have entered the house and sat down before removing your boots. A friend has pressed a drink into your hands, and is telling you the latest news. You see from his face that he's glad you've come in; and you are glad too. Glad to be sitting down, glad of the warming glow of the dirnk, glad of your friend's furrowed brow and eager speech. For this moment, nothing more is required. It is in its way unimprovable. This is what I mean by the Great Enough.
William Nicholson
‎All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.
H. Havelock Ellis
The task is to become church for them, among them and with them, and under Spirit of God to lead them to become church in their own culture.
Tim Chester
The summit of Mauna Kea was definitely a place where it was better to be a hard to replace skilled engineer than an easy to replace technician. It was my experience that once you had developed Mauna Kea Sickness that the management team would blatantly harass you out of your job using nasty inhumane human resources techniques.
Steven Magee
We are being called to a new and deeper passion: to those who live under the shadow of the cross and those most in need of compassion. Then we become mothers of God, sisters and brothers of Jesus, the loved disciples born in the blood of the Cross and fed on the Word of God.
Megan McKenna
Nature is in the process of shutting down corrupt corporations and their government minions.
Steven Magee
Now you look here. All your father ever dreamed of for you was to do something you loved in life. He didn't care about fancy qualifications or fancy clothes or cars, just that you were both happy and fulfilled. He was so excited about your dreams for a career.
Hazel Gaynor
I need grit and struggle and Los Angeles is terribly nice, but people, once they get there, cease to be real. Constant and repetitive fulfillment is not good for the human spirit. We all need rain and good old depression. Life can't be all beer and skittles.
Morrissey
...I remember a rainy, depressing afternoon when she remarked 'What a pity we can't make love, there's nothing else to do,' and he agreed that it was and there wasn't.
Christopher Isherwood
... As Weber suggests, once science is employed to justify and enact ideal values, especially through the actions of an elite few (the academy), particular values, in this case the idea of what is 'natural', are cast into an objectively valid and legitimate form, and thus appear as being beyond critique. And at this point Weber rightly warns that science, contrary to Durkheim's belief, is not both cognitive and moral in nature, for it rests upon a designation of authority, and may, especially if used beyond its own limits, give rise to new means of domination.
Nicholas Gane
Life is like an escalator. You see, it carries you on regardless. And you might as well enjoy the view and seize every opportunity while you're passing. Otherwise, it'll be too late.
Sophie Kinsella
Tom's contemptuous conception of a girl included the attribute of being unfit to walk in dirty places.
George Eliot
The Resurrection is not a single event, but a loosening of God's power and light into the earth and history that continues to alter all things, infusing them with the grace and power of God's own holiness. It is as though a door was opened, and what poured out will never be stopped, and that door cannot be closed.
Megan McKenna
These are some of the characteristics of the state of mind which the creation and appreciation of haiku demand: Selflessness, Loneliness, Grateful Acceptance, Wordlessness, Non-intellectuality, Contradictoriness, Humor, Freedom, Non-morality, Simplicity, Materiality, Love, and Courage.
R.H. Blyth
Maybe I'm in Hell. That's okay, I'm not scared of Hell - it's just Heaven for bad people.
Steven Moffat
He looked at me thoughtfully, and smiled slowly, his green eyes warm. He smelled of the outdoors, he was so tall and broad shouldered and so ... male ... in this house of women he was shockingly different. All I could think of was how much I wanted to kiss him. I was clearly losing my mind.
Abbi Waxman
How astonishingly intimate the business of fiction is, more intimate than anything that issues from the psychiatrist’s couch or even the lovers’ bed. You see the soul, pinned and wriggling on the wall.
Martin Amis
A path well traveled may still yield secrets that only one person may discover.
Anthony T.Hincks
It would appear that the blue sky is actually produced by the solar wind and solar radiation exciting air molecules to emit light, just like a neon lamp!
Steven Magee
O bid these strangers go ;Turn to my lips till their cup overflow ;Hurt me with kisses, kill me with desire,Consume me and destroy me with the fireOf bleeding passion straining at the heart,Touched to the core by sweetnesses that smart ;Bitten by fiery snakes, whose poisonous breathSwoons in the midnight, and dissolves to death !
Aleister Crowley
O comportamento ritual não só revela realidades práticas e mundanas, é também um teatro vivo da psicologia colectiva e uma das mais ricas expressões da ideologia e crenças - mentalidade - de uma sociedade. Afinal de contas, como os antropólogos notaram, a religião é mais do que um padrão de relações sociais: é uma expressão da capacidade humana para imaginar a estrutura da sociedade. O ritual religioso não é apenas construção cultural: é uma forma de cognição que constrói modelos de realidade e paradigmas de comportamento. E dentro deste processo pelo qual a realidade é definida, o ritual da morte joga um papel central.
Victor Turner
The difference between magic and meditation methods is the difference between drugs and diet—medicines will do swiftly what diet can only effect slowly, and in critical cases there is no time to wait for the slow processes of dietetics, so it must be either medicines or nothing. Nevertheless, drugs are no substitute for right diet and wholesome regime, and although magic enables a speedy and potent result to be attained, is is only by means of right understanding and right ethics that the position which has been won can be held.
Dion Fortune
It's a curious thing that the mental life seems to flourish with its roots in spite, ineffable and fathomless spite. Always has been so! Look at Socrates, in Plato, and his bunch round him! The sheer spite of it all, just sheer joy in pulling somebody else to bits...Protagoras, or whoever it was! And Alcibiades, and all the other little disciple dogs joining in the fray! I must say it makes one prefer Buddha, quietly sitting under a bo-tree, or Jesus, telling his disciples little Sunday stories, peacefully, and without any mental fireworks. No, there's something wrong with the mental life, radically. It's rooted in spite and envy, envy and spite. Ye shall know the tree by its fruit.
D.H. Lawrence
A missionary church cannot rely on the professional ministry for the primary work of mission. The role of the laity is critical because it is the lay members of the church who have the greatest contact with those who are outside of the normal structures of church life. In such a situation the task of clergy is not so much to engage in mission themselves, as to support the laity in their mission.
Martin Robinson
Fundamentally, terrorist conflicts are about breaking the will of the enemy. To do this, one does not need to kill all of the enemy’s personnel or destroy all of its resources. One simply has to destroy the idea that ultimate victory is possible. Victory or defeat then, boils down to a question of psychology.
Andrew Silke
Everyone living is doomed
Taylor Caldwell
If bad men, to serve their own private ends, pretend to be religious when they are not, it is not the fault of Christianity. More importantly, it is not the fault of Christ! The Bible tells us that men are to be judged by their fruits; and the wickedness and hypocrisy of a thousand false professors does not prove religion—nor Christ Himself—to be wicked and hypocritical and false. We don’t set our faith and hope on religion or Christianity, but on Christ alone.
George E. Sargent
Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.
Virginia Woolf
The paths you walk in life should always be by design, either consciously or subconsciously.
Steven Redhead
If we really believe what we say we believe- if we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a "wandering to find home", why should we not look forward to the arrival. There are, aren't there, only three things we can do about death: to desire it, to fear it, or to ignore it. The third alternative, which is the one the modern world calls "healthy" is surely the most uneasy and precarious of all.
C.S. Lewis
To do great work one must be very idle as well as very industrious.
Samuel Butler
The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you but he will make a fool of himself too.
Samuel Butler
I learned a long, long time ago, that I could accomplish things in this place we call reality and yet still spend most of my time in the better reality of my mind.
Kevin Walker
It doesn’t matter what you’ve got in your pants if there is nothing in your brain to connect it to.
Paul Joannides
This world is run with far too tight a rein for luck to interfere. Fortune sells her wares she never gives them. In some form or other we pay for her favors or we go empty away.
Amelia Barr
In a justly ordereduniverse, where loss of equipoise would mean total destruction, individual responsibility must be absolute.
James Allen
The whole damn thing started when they gave women the vote.
Gavin Lyall
A fondness for reading, properly directed, must be an education in itself.
Jane Austen
A man's death makes everything certain about him. Of course, secrets may die with him. And of course, a hundred years later somebody looking through some papers may discover a fact which throws a totally different light on his life and of which all the people who attended his funeral were ignorant. Death changes the facts qualitatively but not quantitatively. One does not know more facts about a man because he is dead. But what one already knows hardens and becomes definite. We cannot hope for ambiguities to be clarified, we cannot hope for further change, we cannot hope for more. We are now the protagonists and we have to make up our minds.
John Berger
Only fate would decree how it reached its destiny, which always waited just around the corner, over the hill...
Virginia Alison
We are not like you. We do not glory in having power over our own kind." Haghuf turned to walk away. Then as an afterthought added over his shoulder, "Or imagining that we do.
Jaq D. Hawkins
one of those world builders who do othing but destroy,
John le Carré
They were all fitting into place, the jig-saw pieces. The odd strained shapes that I had tried to piece together with my fumbling fingers and they had never fitted. Frank's odd manner when I spoke about Rebecca. Beatrice and her rather diffident negative attitude. The silence that I had always taken for sympathy and regret was a silence born of shame and embarrassment. It seemed incredible to me now that I had never understood. I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great wall in front of them that hid the truth. This was what I had done. I had built up false pictures in my mind and sat before them. I had never had the courage to demand the truth. Had I made one step forward out of my own shyness Maxim would have told these things four months, five months ago.
Daphne du Maurier
There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa -- and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that his is a new picture agreeing with no one else's, but likely to be haugthily disagreed with by all those who believed in some other Africa. ... Being thus all things to all authors, it follows, I suppose, that Africa must be all things to all readers.Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just 'home.
Beryl Markham
Believe, and what was impossible becomes possible what at first was hidden becomes visible.
Tahir Shah
Reason is God's gift but so are the passions. Reason is as guilty as passion.
Cardinal Newman
A waitress, bringing Finkler more hot water, interrupted Treslove's answer. Finkler always asked for more hot water no matter how much hot water had already been brought. It was his way of asserting power, Treslove thought. No doubt Nietzsche, too, ordered more hot water than he needed.
Howard Jacobson
What day is it,?” asked Pooh. “It’s today,” squeaked Piglet.“My favorite day,” said Pooh.
A.A. Milne
Have you ever hoped for something? And held out for it against all the odds? Until everything you did was ridiculous?
Ali Shaw
Nobody can honestly think of himself as a strong character because however successful he may be in overcoming them he is necessarily aware of the doubts and temptations that accompany every important choice.
W.H. Auden
What so tedious as a twice-told tale?
Alexander Pope
If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.
Thomas de Quincey
Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified.
Virginia Woolf
Who knows, Watson? Woman's heart and mind are insoluble puzzles to the male.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.
Charles Darwin
That's the thing I'm learning about being thrown out on yer own. Nobody does nothing for you. If you don't change it, it don't get changed.
Patrick Ness
Every day I grow in the wisdom that my soul is vibrationally connected to the Universe.
Debbie A. Anderson
Bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers, and when it wasn't raining a diamond dust took over which veiled and yet magnified all things
Laurie Lee
There's so much proscription in the lives of young people, and it's so vital to have a place that says, look, here are the doors onto the world and amazingly, you're free to choose any one you like. - Patrick Ness on Libraries
Patrick Ness