Quotes by British Authors - Page 48

Men whose trade is rat-catching love to catch rats the bug destroyer seizes on his bug with delight and the suppressor is gratified by finding his vice.
Sydney Smith
Teach us to pray often that we may pray oftener.
Jeremy Taylor
Every task you are given, no matter how menial, offers opportunities to observe this world at work. No detail about the people within it is too trivial. Everything you see or hear is a sign for you to decode. Over time, you will begin to see and understand more of the reality that eluded you at first. For instance, a person whom you initially thought had great power ended up being someone with more bark than bite. Slowly, you begin to see behind the appearances. As you amass more information about the rules and power dynamics of your new environment, you can begin to analyze why they exist, and how they relate to larger trends in the field. You move from observation to analysis, honing your reasoning skills, but only after months of careful attention.
Robert Greene
Kiss a lover, Dance a measure, Find your name And buried treasure. Face your life, It's pain, It's pleasure, Leave no path untaken.
Neil Gaiman
When I was going on one day in the car about not having any close friends - using my favourite metaphor: the cage of glass between me and the rest of the world - she just laughed. 'You like it,' she said. 'You say you're isolated, boyo, but you really think you're different.
John Fowles
Observe the eyes, for they are the windows to her soul.
Habeeb Akande
Where error is irreparable, repentance is useless.
Edward Gibbon
If you consulted your business experiences instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter.
G.K. Chesterton
He really just wanted to blurt out, ‘My Grandma’s dead’, but he knew that when it came to it, the words would stick like pebbles in his throat.
Helen Laycock
The opportunity of a lifetime needs to be seized during the lifetime of the opportunity.
Leonard Ravenhill
Saying of the ProphetReflectionThe Faithful are mirrors, one to the other.
Idries Shah
Attack and adversity contribute to national cohesion in a way that success and affluence do not
Jan Dalley
It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.
C.S. Lewis
His hand closed automatically around the fake Horcrux, but in spite of everything, in spite of the dark and twisting path he saw stretching ahead for himself, in spite of the final meeting with Voldemort he knew must come, whether in a month, in a year, or in ten, he felt his heart lift at the thought that there was still one last golden day of peace left to enjoy with Ron and Hermione.
J.K. Rowling
There are moments of despair that come sometimes, when night sets in and a white fog presses against the windows. Then our house changes its shape, rears up and becomes a place of despair. Then fear and rage run simply--and the thought of Death as a friend. This is the simplest of thoughts, that Death must come when we call, although he is a god.
Stevie Smith
And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that (Hell) contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good.
C.S. Lewis
...for to be sunk, though but for an hour in your esteem is a humiliation to which I know not how to submit. -Susan
Jane Austen
Lots of people would be as cowardly as me if they were brave enough.
Terry Pratchett
The world' is man's experience as it appears to, and is moulded by, his ego. It is that less abundant life, which is lived according to the dictates of the insulated self. It is nature denatured by the distorting spectacles of our appetites and revulsions. It is the finite divorced from the Eternal. It is multiplicity in isolation from its non-dual Ground. It is time apprehended as one damned thing after another. It is a system of verbal categories taking the place of the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars which constitute reality. It is a notion labelled 'God'. It is the Universe equated with the words of our utilitarian vocabulary.
Aldous Huxley
I don't care much for diamonds,' Nicola had told him.'Have you ever been offered any?' he had asked, and he had been making fun of her, his face mocking.'Not that I can remember,' Nicola had admitted calmly.'And how would an offer be received?' he had asked, as though he knew the answer.'With a kick in the teeth,' Nicola had said, meeting his eye.
Charlotte Lamb
I am never afraid of what I know.
Anna Sewell
My parents had told me that I would not really die, not the real me: that nobody really died, when they died; that my kitten and the opal miner had just taken new bodies and would be back again, soon enough.
Neil Gaiman
I am not your dear; I cannot lie down: send me to school soon, Mrs. Reed, for I hate to live here.
Charlotte Brontë
Giraldus claimed that he had heard about Eleanor's adultery with Geoffrey from the saintly Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, who had learned of it from Henry II of England, Geoffrey's son and Eleanor's second husband. Eleanor was estranged from Henry at the time Giraldus was writing, and the king was trying to secure an annulment of their marriage from the Pope. It would have been to his advantage to declare her an adulterous wife who had had carnal relations with his father, for that in itself would have rendered their marriage incestuous and would have provided prima facie grounds for its dissolution.
Alison Weir
We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us.
Winston S. Churchill
Where's your dog?" Peter's voice came from within the gushing stream of water. Justin thought he must have misheard."Pardon?""Your dog.""Yes?""Isn't he with you today?" Justin looked at Peter."Ha bloody ha." Peter stuck his head out of the stream of water, features dripping. He smiled shyly. "I love greyhounds." Justin stared."My dog is imaginary.""Oh." Peter looked interested. "That's unusual." Justin put his head under the water. When he emerged, Peter was still looking at him."Less work," Peter offered, cheerily. "If the dog's imaginary, I mean. Not so much grooming, feeding, et cetera.
Meg Rosoff
He may wear what he likes in the future, for I shall never drive with him again. His conduct was shocking. When we passed Highgate Archway, he tried to pass everything and everybody. He shouted to respectable people who were walking quietly in the road to get out of the way; he flicked at the horse of an old man who was riding, causing it to rear; and, as I had to ride backwards, I was compelled to face a gang of roughs in a donkey-cart, whom Lupin had chaffed, and who turned and followed us for nearly a mile, bellowing, indulging in coarse jokes and laughter, to say nothing of occasionally pelting us with orange-peel.
George Grossmith
We may rifle the treasures of antiquity and make the heathen contribute to the gospel even as Hiram of Tyre served under Solomon's direction for the building of the Temple.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
There's room for all sorts of magic and miracles in this world - that's what I think.
Michael Morpurgo
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaEmotionalist:A man or woman who thinks he has experienced the divine.
Idries Shah
For that matter, all this, is there a God? Corlis -- I don't care!""Huh," I considered. "I guess I don't either"."Most people don't! All they care about," he added grimly, "is being right".
Lionel Shriver
It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.
Alexander McCall Smith
The things she said seemed to have very little relation to the last thing she had said a minute before. She was the sort of person, Tommy thought, who might know a great deal more than she chose to reveal.
Agatha Christie
The lion is not so fierce as they paint him.
George Edward Herbert
I felt emotions of gentleness and pleasure, that had long appeared dead, revive within me. Half surprised by the novelty of these sensations, I allowed myself to be borne away by them, and forgetting my solitude and deformity, dared to be happy.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
As long as one suffers one lives.
Graham Greene
Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.
Jane Austen
The truth is: the natural world is changing. And we are totally dependent on that world. It provides our food, water and air. It is the most precious thing we have and we need to defend it.
David Attenborough
You must accept the reality of other people. You think that reality is up for negotiation, that we think it's whatever you say it is. You must accept that we are as real as you are; you must accept that you are not God.
J.K. Rowling
This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today.
David Nicholls
Each of us is born to follow a star, be it bright and shining or dark and fated. Sometimes the path of these stars will cross, bringing love or hatred. However, if you look up at the skies on a clear night, out of all the countless lights that twinkle and shine, there will come one. That star will be seen in a blaze, burning a path of light across the roof of the earth, a great comet.
Brian Jacques
There are normal times when it is wholly admirable to be steadfast, resolute, unconflicted, and therefore when integrity is unmistakenly a virtue. The person of integrity knows what to do, and does it. But as we have been exploring, there are also times when certainty and single-mindedness indicate something less admirable: a deafness to voices that should be heard or a blindness to aspects of a situation that need to be considered.
Simon Blackburn
Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their vo
Helen Dunmore
Haven't you noticed by this time that everyone's lives are full of things you can't understand? The exceptional thing is the thing you can understand.
Robert Aickman
The arts can sharpen the vision, quicken the intellect, preserve the memory, activate the conscience, enhance the understanding and refresh the language.
Steve Turner
Mythology was never designed to describe historically verifiable events that actually happened. It was an attempt to express their inner significance or to draw attention to realities that were too elusive to be discussed in a logically coherent way.
Karen Armstrong
I hope I know my own unworthiness, and that I hate and despise myself and all my fellow-creatures as every practicable Christian should.
Charles Dickens
Revenge is a business of calculation, best served cold. Rescue holds more of sacrifice, suicidal danger, and all manner of other madness that should have me running in the opposite direction.
Mark Lawrence
Most people would die sooner than think in fact they do.
Bertrand Russell
Morality existed only in action. It arose out of action: was formed and tested in action: expressed itself in action. That was why we mustn't cheapen it with words
C.P. Snow
If you had come to me a hundred years ago, do you think I should have dreamed of the telephone? Why, even now I cannot understand it! I use it every day, I transact half my correspondence by means of it, but I don’t understand it. Think of that little stretched disk of iron at the end of a wire repeating in your ear not only sounds, but words—not only words, but all the most delicate and elusive inflections and nuances of tone which separate one human voice from another!
William Crookes
How do you...? What is it you're doing?" he said to Vardy as the man took a breath, mid-insight. What do you call that? Billy thought. That reconstitutitive intelligence, berserker meme-splicing, seeing in nothings first patterns, then correspondence, then causality and dissident sense.Vardy even smiled. "Paranoid," he said. "Theology.
China Miéville
No one who is good can ever be ugly.
Roald Dahl
Masculinity cannot exist without femininity. On its own, masculinity has no meaning, because it is but one half of a set of power relations. Masculinity pertains to male dominance as femininity pertains to female subordination.
Sheila Jeffreys
We swung over the hills and over the town and back again, and I saw how a man can be master of a craft, and how a craft can be master of an element. I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup. I learned to watch, to put my trust in other hands than mine. And I learned to wander. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know -- that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.
Beryl Markham
Achievement was worth of praise and honor, but excessive achievement was pernicious and a threat to the state. However great a citizen might become, however great he might wish to become, the truest greatness of all still belonged to the Roman Republic itself
Tom Holland
A popular perception that political news is boring is no minor issue; for when news fails to harness the curiosity and attention of a mass audience through its presentational techniques, a society becomes dangerously unable to grapple with its own dilemmas and therefore to marshal the popular will to change and improve itself.
Alain de Botton
you must be careful with kindness. It's usually mistaken for weakness by stupid people.
Clive Barker
Why do people go to these places, these places that are not for them?It must be that they believe in their night vision. They believe themselves able to draw images up out of the dark.But black wells only yield black water.
Helen Oyeyemi
It is a Sufi contention that truth is not discovered or maintained by the mere repetition of teachings. It can only be kept understood by the perpetual experience of it. And it is in the experience of truth that the Sufis have always reposed their trust. Sufism is therefore not 'Do as I say and not as I do', or even 'Do as I do', but 'Experience it and you will know'.
Idries Shah