Quotes by British Authors - Page 47

None should say: ‘I can trust,’ or ‘I cannot trust’ until he is master of the option, of trusting or not trusting.
Idries Shah
In the realm of dream and imagination all men are equal.
John Christopher
It is necessary to hope... for hope itself is happiness.
Samuel Johnson
If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
Kingsley Amis
Face your true self. You're reaction when facing any animal is much more likely to be Ahh, cute than Yum, dinner!
Mango Wodzak
In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.
George Eliot
PE! This word was comprised of two single letters, which would normally not cause anyone any trouble. They were two single letters that were usually associated with the further words of “health” and “extended life” and therefore, had a positive reputation. However, for me, the P and the E put together was the worst possible combination. Every time they were mentioned, I would sigh in displeasure, my heart rate would increase and I would feel lightheaded. After all, in my mind, PE = exercise and exercise = torture!
Adele Rose
First our pleasures die - and then Our hopes and then our fears - and when These are dead the debt is due Dust claims dust - and we die too.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
for the disproportionate fear that the statistically and historically minimal group of women who were both angry and had hairy legs have inculcated both in their detractors and in their wannabe-successors, we should salute them as often as possible
Nina Power
We can overcome division only by refusing to be divided.
Raymond Williams
[She was] a creature full of eager, passionate longings for all that was beautiful and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; with an ear straining after dreamy music that died away and would not come near to her; with a blind unconscious yearning for something that would link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life, and give her soul a sense of home in it.
George Eliot
I may be naked, but my thoughts are still hidden.
Anthony T.Hincks
Why is it," she asked, snuggling closer, "that I so often imagine myself running away and running free?
Mary Balogh
I am above the forest region, amongst grand rocks & such a torrent as you see in Salvator Rosa's paintings vegetation all a scrub of rhodos. with Pines below me as thick & bad to get through as our Fuegian Fagi on the hill tops, & except the towering peaks of P. S. [perpetual snow] that, here shoot up on all hands there is little difference in the mt scenery—here however the blaze of Rhod. flowers and various colored jungle proclaims a differently constituted region in a naturalist's eye & twenty species here, to one there, always are asking me the vexed question, where do we come from?[Letter to Charles Darwin 24 Jun 1849]
Joseph Dalton Hooker
atheists are the most faithful people I ever met
Dean Cavanagh
To be simple is the best thing in the world.
G.K. Chesterton
Whoever might perfume a scorpionWill not thereby escape its sting. Bahaudin Naqshband
Idries Shah
As a radiation researcher, I am at one with being perceived as crazy!
Steven Magee
A quiet mind is the quickest and biggest step to a peaceful world.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Christmas is about community, collaboration, celebration. Done right, Christmas can be an antidote to the Me First mentality that has rebranded capitalism as neo-liberalism. The shopping mall isn't our true home, nor is it a public space, though, as libraries, parks, playgrounds, museums and sports facilities disappear, for many the fake friendliness of the mall is the only public space left, apart from the streets
Jeanette Winterson
Buddha guides my thoughts, but it's up to me to guide my life.
Anthony T.Hincks
I fear it is the end for us,’ wailed Marx as the bears inched closer. ‘Is this the way you saw yourself going. Pirate Captain:‘In fact,’ said the Captain grumpily, ‘it’s pretty much the exact situation I usually try to cheer myself up with when I’m in a bit of a fix. “At least you’re not about to be eaten by bears and/or fall into a replica volcano,” I tell myself. So now I’ve got to come up with an even worse scenario, which is a nuisance.
Gideon Defoe
Around the outside of the room other beautiful women wearing little or nothing at all flitted between the infatuated, intoxicated men, sometimes luring them away for a private dance. The men would follow obediently, weighed down by lust and credit cards.
R.D. Ronald
In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.
C.S. Lewis
The internet was supposed to liberate knowledge, but in fact it buried it, first under a vast sewer of ignorance, laziness, bigotry, superstition and filth and then beneath the cloak of political surveillance. Now...cyberspace exists exclusively to promote commerce, gossip and pornography. And of course to hunt down sedition. Only paper is safe. Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar, you have to hold it, you have to read it.
Ben Elton
We could manage to survive without money changers and stockbrokers. We should find it harder to do without miners, steel workers and those who cultivate the land
Aneurin Bevan
Do not work so hard for Christ that you have no strength to pray for prayer requires strength.
J. Hudson Taylor
I reach forward for him, expecting to feel the hardness of his chest or at the very least one of his arms coming to halt my progress, but there is nothing. I expand my reach a little and then, feeling slightly spooked, I listen… Nothing. No breathing, no footsteps; nothing.
Felicity Brandon
There is no wisdom equal to that which comes after the event.
Geraldine Jewsbury
There's pathos in this familiar routine, in the sounds of homely objects touching surfaces. And in the little sigh she makes when she turns or slightly bends our unwieldy form. It's already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence. When she's no longer twenty-eight and pregnant and beautiful, or even free, she won't remember the way she set down the spoon and the sound it made on slate, the frock she wore today, the touch of her sandal's thong between her toes, the summer's warmth, the white noise of the city beyond the house walls, a short burst of birdsong by a closed window. All gone, already.
Ian McEwan
A God made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
What is the point of having all this power if you can’t force people to do what you want?
Ian Gregoire
I'm really not quite as frippery a fellow as you seem to think! I own that in my grasstime I committed a great many follies and extravagances, but, believe me, I've long since out-grown them! I don't think they were any worse than what nine out of ten youngsters commit, but unfortunately I achieved, through certain circumstances, a notoriety which most young men escape. I was born with a natural aptitude for the sporting pursuits you regard with so much distrust, and I inherited, at far too early an age, a fortune which not only enabled me to indulge my tastes in the most expensive manner imaginable, but which made me an object of such interest that everything I did was noted, and talked of. That's heady stuff for greenhorns, you know! There was a time when I gave the gossips plenty to talk about. But do give me credit for having seen the error of my ways!
Georgette Heyer
For real men serve their country with random acts of kindness, not vicious acts of violence. And real soldiers have one duty, and one duty only; they have a duty to mutiny!
Joss Sheldon
Poor feeling hijacks thinking for self-deception: to hide harsh truths, avoid action, evade responsibility, and, as the existentialists might put it, flee from freedom. Thus, poor feeling is a kind of moral failing, indeed, the deepest kind, and virtue principally consists in correcting and refining our emotions and the values that they reflect. To feel the right thing is to do the right thing, without any particular need for conscious thought or effort.
Neel Burton
You’ve been wondering lately when the moment is that somebody is truly lost to you.
Sarah Hall
Wear a smile and have friends wear a scowl and have wrinkles.
George Eliot
Movies are a fad. Audiences really want to see live actors on a stage.
Charlie Chaplin
live life like its going out of style
Andrew Robert Burn
Great men too often have greater faults than little men can find room for.
Walter Savage Landor
She thought about how it was so simple with animals. They gave their hearts without question or fear. They had no expectations. They were so easy to love. If people could only be like that, no one would ever be hurt, she thought. No one would ever need to learn how to forgive.
Elizabeth George
Never give way to melancholy resist it steadily for the habit will encroach.
Sydney Smith
Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.
C.S. Lewis
She'd been cross so much of the time and often about small things. Looking back at herself, she thought that her crossness was like a shapeless overcoat, covering loneliness, and it wasn't the old loneliness she'd felt after her mother died, or even an adult version of it, but something different and more punishing.
Rosamund Lupton
The kiss was so soft she couldn’t believe this was the same bad boy who’d said such things to her with that mouth.
Rebecca Brooks
My heart almost died within me; miserable longings strained its chords. How long were the September days! How silent, how lifeless!
Charlotte Brontë
Laughter is an anarchic blasphemy. Tyrants are wise to fear it.
David Mitchell
There are many excuses for the person who made the mistake of confounding money and wealth. Like many others they mistook the sign for the thing signified.
Millicent Garrett Fawcett
That was why Peg loved the Messiah best of all. Because it showed people they were not alone. No matter about their differences, the music lifted them up and lowered them down, only to raise them even higher. It worked like a spell.
Rachel Joyce
Since I speak and write about this a good deal, I am often asked at public meetings, in what sometimes seems to me a rather prurient way, whether I myself or my family have 'ever been threatened' by jihadists. My answer is that yes, I have, and so has everyone else in the audience, if they have paid enough attention to the relevant bin-Ladenist broadcasts to notice the fact.
Christopher Hitchens
You move on. You move back. On because you're always getting older, back because there's always a set of habits and routines to catch you and suck you back in when your guard is down.
Mike Carey
Written up in marker on a factory sign:I struggle with the feeling that my life isn't mine
Coldplay
He moved now, A tiny jerk of movement, and Elissa saw what she hadn't grasped before. that his fingers showed white and bloodless against he dark blue of his jacket, that his face was so tense that skin seemed to stretch taut over the bones beneath. Then he spoke, and she realized he wasn't calm. He was violently angry."WHY, Captain?" he said, so much suppressed anger in his voice that it felt as if it would shatter something. "I would have thought the the real question was WHY NOT?
Imogen Howson
Thinking can only serve to measure out the helplessness of thought.
H. Rider Haggard
And there’s no synthetic owners manual?” His lips twitched, smile threatening to break into a grin. A joke. He wasn’t funny. “Do you come with an owners’ manual, Captain? Because I’d like to study your troubleshooting section.”“Would you like to strip me down to my nuts and bolts, and figure out what makes me tick?”“I knew what made you tick from the moment we first met. That’s why I punched you between the legs.”~ #1001 & Caleb
Pippa DaCosta
Panic attacks are a lot like being drunk in some ways, you lose self-control. You cry for seemingly no reason. You deal with the hangover long into the next day.
Sara Barnard
And Death spoke to them —’”“Sorry,” interjected Harry, “but Death spoke to them?”“It’s a fairy tale, Harry!”“Right, sorry. Go on.
J.K. Rowling
To still seek God after discovering Him may be a love paradox of the soul, as A.W. Tozer reminds us; but to earnestly continue to perceive God and make Him perceivable, is the quintessence of worship.
Tristan Sherwin
Tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country.
George Orwell
Fat Charlie went back to his hotel room, the colour of underwater, where his lime sat, like a small green Buddha, on the countertop."You're no help," he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could.
Neil Gaiman