Quotes by British Authors - Page 31

all living creatures are entitled to respect in their own right, not simply because of the utility they may possess for other humans.
Damien Keown
I love being able to see an un-written future.
Michael Jones
The English murder their meat twice: once when they shoot it, again when they cook it. 'Drôle, n'est-ce pas'?
Peter Mayle
He moved closer to her, his face just inches away from her. They stood motionless. Jason looked deep into her eyes. He tore away her barriers and locked eyes. His nose two inches away, he slightly tilted his face and looked at her lips. She slightly turned her face at the opposite angle.
Mark A. Cooper
Comments are free but facts are sacred.
C. P. Scott
What is Life?(1) Tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.(2) Dictionary definition in biology (chemical process within organic entities involving metabolism etc.)(3) Mrs Woolf: ‘Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.’(4) Series of actual and hypothetical behavioural data which differ in certain assignable ways from data defining dead or inanimate entities.(5) That which the Lord infused into Adam. See Genesis 1. 4 [sc. 2. 7].Which?Mental Cramp.
Isaiah Berlin
@The darkest and most complex novel in (the Murdoch) series.
Maureen Jennings
Yes, she'd made a mistake... but she wasn't going to be bullied. You couldn't let boys go around raining on your lava and ogling other people's watercolors.
Terry Pratchett
Base words are uttered only by the baseAnd can for such at once be understood;But noble platitudes — ah, there's a caseWhere the most careful scrutiny is neededTo tell a voice that's genuinely goodFrom one that's base but merely has succeeded.
W.H. Auden
When we discover who we are We will be free
Mimi Novic
Was he, after all, really a bad man doing a brilliant impersonation of an idiot? It was hard to tell. The connections between stupidity and malice were so tangled and so dense.
Edward St. Aubyn
He willed that the hearts of Men should seek beyond the world and should find no rest therein; but they should have a virtue to shape their life, amid the powers and chances of the world, beyond the Music of the Ainur, which is as fate to all things else.
J.R.R. Tolkien
‎And yet I have had the weakness, and have still the weakness, to wish you to know with what a sudden mastery you kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire.
Charles Dickens
God has made all things that are in the world to be our teachers.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
True friends ... face in the same direction toward common projects interests goals.
C.S. Lewis
When people show you who they are, believe them.
Jane Green
She had never been able to tolerate dishonesty, which she thought threatened the very heart of relationships between people. If you could not count on other people to mean what they said, or to do what they said they would do, then life could become utterly unpredictable. The fact that we could trust one another made it possible to undertake the simple tasks of life.
Alexander McCall Smith
If children learn of sex as a relation between their parents to which they owe their own existence, they learn of it in its best form and in connection with its biological purpose.
Bertrand Russell
How many miles to Babylon?Three score and ten!Can I get there by candle light?Yes, and back again?
E Nesbit
Remember in any case, that not only the Adept, but anyone with the smallest capacity for Adeptship, is fundamentally an Artist; he will certainly not possess any of those bourgeois "virtues" which are just so many reactions to Blue Funk.
Aleister Crowley
Love is the only answer to every question. It is the only thing that will serve you in every situation. It is the route and the destination. It is medication, liberation and should be at the heart of and expression of your vocation.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
We have less reason to be surprised or offended when we find others differ from us in opinions because we very often differ from ourselves.
Samuel Johnson
Plato claimed that we were all joined to someone else once, we were humans with four arms and four legs, and a head of two faces, but we were so powerful we threatened to topple the Gods. So they split us from our sole mates down the middle, and doomed us to live forever without our counterparts
Sarah Crossan
The more things we accumulate, the more cluttered our lives become, and the more stressed we feel as we are compelled to think about them. Life is about people not about things.
Natalie Vellacott
An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.
John Buchan
In these days of faith-cures, and hypnotism, and telepathy, and subliminalities – why, the simple old world grows very confusing. But rarely, very rarely novel.
Walter de la Mare
It is a purely relative matter where one draws the plimsoll-line of condemnation and ... if you find the whole of humanity falls below it you have simply made a mistake and drawn it too high. And you are probably below it yourself.
Frances Partridge
And if we do speak out, we risk rejection and ridicule. I had a best friend once, the kind that you go shopping with and watch films with, the kind you go on holiday with and rescue when her car breaks down on the A1. Shortly after my diagnosis, I told her I had DID. I haven't seen her since. The stench and rankness of a socially unacceptable mental health disorder seems to have driven her away.
Carolyn Spring
Land of hope and glory Mother of the Free How shall we extol thee who are borne of thee? Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set God who made thee mighty make thee mightier yet.
A.C. Benson
It’s bad enough barging into Guild property, but we’ll get into really serious trouble if we shoot anyone. Lord Vetinari won’t stop at sarcasm. He might use’ - Colon swallowed - ‘irony.
Terry Pratchett
It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out - it's the grain of sand in your shoe.
Robert Service
George got out his banjo after supper, and wanted to play it, but Harris objected: he said he had got a headache, and did not feel strong enough to stand it. George thought the music might do him good - said music often soothed the nerves and took away a headache; and he twanged two or three notes, just to show Harris what it was like.Harris said he would rather have the headache.
Jerome K. Jerome
What's your name,' Coraline asked the cat. 'Look, I'm Coraline. Okay?''Cats don't have names,' it said.'No?' said Coraline.'No,' said the cat. 'Now you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names.
Neil Gaiman
His intuition was luminous from the instant you met him. So was his intelligence. A lot of actors act intelligent, but Philip was the real thing: a shining, artistic polymath with an intelligence that came at you like a pair of headlights and enveloped you from the moment he grabbed your hand, put a huge arm round your neck and shoved a cheek against yours; or if the mood took him, hugged you to him like a big, pudgy schoolboy, then stood and beamed at you while he took stock of the effect. (About Philip Seymour Hoffman)
John le Carré
Coffee is a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your older self.
Terry Pratchett
But it is only people who have plenty of money who can despise it. To the rest of us it is important. It can at least put food in our stomachs clothes on our backs, and it can at least feed our dreams.
Mary Balogh
Why do you want a political career? Have you ever been in the House of Commons and taken a good look at the inmates? As weird a gaggle of freaks and sub-humans as was ever collected in one spot.
P.G. Wodehouse
So much to do so little done.
Cecil Rhodes
I don't have to touch God to know that he's real.
Anthony T.Hincks
Time spent in one place deepens this interaction, creating a melding and meshing that can feel a bit like love. In the drowsy light of the coming evening I not only see where I've walked before, but who I was when I walked there. What I was feeling; what I was thinking. And isn't this how we navigate this sphere? Creating fusions of human and place, attaching meaning and emotions, drawing cognitive maps that make scenes of the realm beyond our comprehension? Our connection to the world is always two things at once: instinctive and augmented.
Rob Cowen
So he caught her in his arms and kissed her, and they were very happy, and told each other what a beautiful world it was, and how wonderful it was that they should have found each other, seeing that the world is not only beautiful but rather large.
E Nesbit
The public thinks big, sensible, measured thoughts while people run around doing silly things
Terry Pratchett
Man is more miserable, more restless and unsatisfied than ever before, simply because half his nature--the spiritual--is starving for true food, and the other half--the material--is fed with bad food.
Paul Brunton
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not money, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not money, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not money, it profiteth me nothing. Money suffereth long, and is kind; money envieth not; money vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. . . . And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money. I Corinthians xiii (adapted)
George Orwell
YOUR LIFE IS WHAT YOU CHOOSE IT TO BE FROM EVERY MOMENT ONWARDS, WITHIN THE LIMITS OF YOUR CONTROL. AT TIMES YOU WILL HAVE TO REGROUP AND ADAPT DUE TO ISSUES OUTSIDE OF YOUR CONTROL. BUT MANY OF LIFE’S OUTCOMES ARE DETERMINED BY ITS CHIEF MASTER: YOU!
Jonny Oates
Intelligence and effort can be no compensation for ugliness.
Hanif Kureishi
Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.
W Somerset Maugham
A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than their, it is because they are made with ideas.
G H Hardy
I can't believe that we have reached the end of everything. The red dust is frightening. The carbon dioxide is real. Water is expensive. Bio-tech has created as many problems as it has fixed, but we're here, we're alive, we're the human race, we have survived wars and terrorism and scarcity and global famine, and we have made it back from the brink, not once but many times. History is not a suicide note - it's a record of our survival.
Jeanette Winterson
Neither spoke, but lat silently listening to the ticking of the clock. A stair creaked, and a squeaky mouse scurried noisily through the wall. The darkness was oppressive, and after lying for some time screwing up his courage, he took the box of matches, and striking one, went downstairs for a candle.At the foot of the stairs the match went out, and he paused to strike another; and at the same moment a knock came so quiet and stealthy as to be scarcely audible, sounded on the front door.The matches fell from his hand and spilled in the passage. He stood motionless, his breath suspended until the knock was repeated. Then he turned and fled swiftly back to his room, and closed the door behind him. A third knock sounded through the house.
W.W. Jacobs
As seasons change, life changes!
Lily Amis
It was not often that Flay approved of happiness in others. He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt. But on an occasion such as this it was different, for the spirit of convention was being rigorously adhered to, and in between his ribs Mr. Flay experienced twinges of pleasure.
Mervyn Peake
If I lie down on my bed I must be here,But if I lie down in my grave I may be elsewhere.
Stevie Smith
And from the coffin of your madness there is no escape.
Angela Carter
I preach darkness. I don't inspire hope—only shadows. It's up to you to find the light in my words.
Charles Lee
New media don’t succeed because they’re like the old media, only better: they succeed because they’re worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at. Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list.
Cory Doctorow
One day you'll discover that the opinions of worthless people are worthless.
Piers Anthony
Madness is a matter of perspective, little dreamer.
Samantha Shannon
Never give a sucker an even break, but don't cheat a friend.
Cary Grant Mr. Lucky