Quotes by British Authors - Page 5

Plug into the anti-obvious power of the rebel. Or get those opposing minds to plug into your purpose, to solve your problem, to reimagine your process.
Max McKeown
Memoirs: the backstairs of history.
George Meredith
Diplomacy and virtue do not make easy companions.
Iain Pears
Revenge may be wicked, but it’s natural.
William Makepeace Thackeray
That’s the moon,’ I said.‘Gran likes it like that,’ said Lettie Hempstock.‘But it was a crescent moon yesterday. And now it’s full. And it was raining. It is raining. But now it’s not.’‘Gran likes the full moon to shine on this side of the house. She says it’s restful, and it reminds her of when she was a girl,’ said Lettie. ‘And you don’t trip on the stairs.
Neil Gaiman
The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple — to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.
Craig Raine
We thought we'd seen it all. The real horror of war is always waiting for you at home. It's waiting, I tell you. We were so damned happy when we got back. We'd made it. We survived. But it's always waiting. Waiting. You let down your guard. And there it is. You can't ever let up. Give up.
James Anderson
Sometimes they threaten you with something - something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, "Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to So-and-so." And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself, and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You WANT it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care is yourself.
George Orwell
EPITAPH OF JALALUDIN RUMIWhen we are dead, seek not our tomb in the earth, but find it in the hearts of men.
Idries Shah
Many educators are loth to admit that the pursuit of pleasure might be a valid reason for drug use, or to recognize young people's curiosity, their need to experiment, to take risks and define their own boundaries.
Tom Feiling
Up to this point, it was rare for the mad to be distinguished from the poor, the homeless, the indigent, beggars, vagabonds, petty criminals and others who were unable to fit into society or take care of themselves. It was rare, too, that they were locked up.
Mike Jay
A robin redbreast in a cagePuts all heaven in a rage.A dove-house fill'd with doves and pigeonsShudders hell thro' all its regions.A dog starv'd at his master's gatePredicts the ruin of the state.A horse misused upon the roadCalls to heaven for human blood.Each outcry of the hunted hareA fibre from the brain does tear.A skylark wounded in the wing,A cherubim does cease to sing.The game-cock clipt and arm'd for fightDoes the rising sun affright.Every wolf's and lion's howlRaises from hell a human soul.- "Auguries of Innocence
William Blake
It's a funny things about human nature. Nobody ever wonders why they've got a healthy brother or a perfect kiddie. Anything goes wrong, though, we soon start why, oh why...
Laurie Graham
How will the remaining portion of the community like to have the amusements that shall be permitted to them regulated by the religious and moral sentiments of the stricter Calvinists and Methodists? Would they not, with considerable peremptoriness, desire these intrusively pious members of society to mind their own business? This is precisely what should be said to every government and every public, who have the pretension that no person shall enjoy any pleasure which they think wrong.
John Stuart Mill
The Destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as a collection of monkeys throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees.
T.H. White
Internationalism is in any case hostile to democracy….The only purely popular government is local, and founded on local knowledge. The citizens can rule the city because they know the city; but it will always be an exceptional sort of citizen who has or claims the right to rule over ten cities, and these remote and altogether alien cities…To make all politics cosmopolitan is to create an aristocracy of globe-trotters. If your political outlook really takes in the Cannibal Islands, you depend of necessity upon a superior and picked minority of the people who have been to the Cannibal Islands; or rather of the still smaller and more select minority who have come back.
G.K. Chesterton
Be a visionary, focused upon your ability to create your desires within your reality.
Steven Redhead
Change lays her hand not upon the truth.
Algernon Swinburne
The true soldier fights
G.K. Chesterton
You get a lot of borderline cases in libraries.
Anita Brookner
Gone are the days when girls used to cook like their mothers and boys used to dress like their fathers. Now girls drink like their fathers and boys dress like their mothers.
Habeeb Akande
See it first in your mind, then become it.
Steve Backley
He sat down in his chair by the fire and began to chat, as was his habit before he and his wife parted to dress for dinner. When he was out during the day he often looked forward to these chats, and made notes of things he would like to tell his Mary. During her day, which was given to feminine duties and pleasures, she frequently did the same thing. Between seven and eight in the evening they had delightful conversational opportunities. He picked up her book and glanced it over, he asked her a few questions and answered a few...
Frances Hodgson Burnett
It was nearly lunch-time before Blackie had finished and went in search of T. Chaos had advanced. The kitchen was a shambles of broken glass and china, the dining-room was stripped of parquet, the skirting was up, the door had been taken off its hinges, and the destroyers had moved up a floor. Streaks of light came in through the closed shutters where they worked with the seriousness of creators - and destruction after all is a form of creation. A kind of imagination had seen this house as it had now become. ("The Destructors")
Graham Greene
The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they've found it.
Terry Pratchett
Let me be one of the upward and outward lookers, not one of the downward and inward lookers.
Alfred Edersheim
There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which now manifests itself as religion.
Richard Dawkins
But that, in shutting out the light of day, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker, I knew equally well. And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?
Charles Dickens
To try is to invite uncertainty. Where confidence goes, success usually follows.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
[Talking about Rosalind in As You Like It] She disguises herself as a boy, drops all the covering inhibitions of "femininity", and really searches for her true self (...) Her disguise gives her the ability to find out about herself, what she really thinks and feels (...). And she can do all this freely, without having anyone in power tell her how women should or should not behave.(...)
Tina Packer
I knew exactly when the fever had struck. I had been reading Hamlet in an English class at school. Everyone else stumbled, puzzling over the strange words. Then it had been my turn, and the language had suddenly woken in me, so that my heart and lungs and tongue and throat were on fire. Later, I understood that this was why people spoke of Shakespeare as a god. At the time, I felt like weeping. Somebody had released me from dumbness, from utter isolation. I knew that I could live inside these words, that they would give me a a shape, a shell. I had no idea, then, that I would never play Hamlet…. I’m an actor, and in a good year I earn eleven thousand pounds for dressing up as a carrot.
Amanda Craig
The function of advertising is simply to promote and sustain competitive advantage for brands.
John Hegarty
most men know what they hate few what they love
Charles Caleb Colton
In this hour, I do not believe that any darkness will endure.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Christmas! The very word brings joy to our hearts. No matter how we may dread the rush, the long Christmas lists for gifts and cards to be bought and given--when Christmas Day comes there is still the same warm feeling we had as children, the same warmth that enfolds our hearts and our homes.
Joan Winmill Brown
When we told our guide that we didn't want to go to all the tourist places he took us instead to the places where they take tourists who say that they don't want to go to tourist places. These places are, of course, full of tourists.
Douglas Adams
I have lost friends some by death ... others by sheer inability to cross the street.
Virginia Woolf
It is to the middle class we must look for the safety of England.
William Thackeray
No one can do me any good by loving me I have more love than I need or could do any good with but people do me good by making me love them - which isn't easy.
John Ruskin
The past is a distraction, a source of envy, enmity, bitterness. Only the present matters, for only in the present can we shape the future.Cut loose the past; it is dead weight.Let the Extirpation continue. Let it never end.
Stephen Baxter
Give them pleasure. The same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.
Alfred Hitchcock
That's how it is with relationships, it's a part of life, and all the great love songs and poems and films have been written by people who were standing where I was that morning as Simon shut the door. Doesn't make it any easier though.
Jane Green
The capacity to form attachments on equal terms is considered evidence of emotional maturity. It is the absence of this capacity which is pathological. Whether there may be other criteria of emotional maturity, like the capacity to be alone, is seldom taken into account.
Anthony Storr
Although Martin Luther's theological message was couched as an exhortation to all Christian people, his frame of reference, the human experiences on which he drew and his emotional sympathies, or almost entirely German.
Andrew Pettegree
Sometimes people with low self-esteem will try to punish you for caring about them.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out.
J.K. Rowling
The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious.
John Stuart Mill
A good laugh is sunshine in a house.
William Thackeray
One bright day in the last week of February, I was walking in the park, enjoying the threefold luxury of solitude, a book, and pleasant weather.
Anne Brontë
Among the hundred thousand mysterious influences which a man exercises over a woman who loves him, I doubt if there is any more irresistible to her than the influence of his voice. I am not one of those women who shed tears on the smallest provocation: it is not in my temperament, I suppose. But when I heard that little natural change in his tone my mind went back (I can't say why) to the happy day when I first owned that I loved him. I burst out crying.
Wilkie Collins
It was nothing less than murder, in her eyes
Emily Brontë
I let go of all that I had thought was wounded, for there is no ego to wound, no ego to hold on with; there is only love & freedom to love.
Jay Woodman
We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.
George Eliot
For the rest of the night he sat by himself under the elm-tree. Until this moment it had never seemed to him that his magicianship set him apart from other men. But now he had glimpsed the wrong side of something. He had the eeriest feeling - as if the world were growing older around him, and the best part of existence - laughter, love and innocence - were slipping irrevocably into the past.
Susanna Clarke
In spite of this, there is no doubt that the modern European and American system of universal education suffered from serious defects. In the first place, the achievement of universality was purchased by the substitution of quantitative for qualitative standards. Education was accepted as a good in itself and the main question was how to increase the total output: how to teach more and more people more and more subjects for longer and longer periods. But in proportion as education became universal, it became cheapened. Instead of being regarded as the privilege of a few it became a compulsory routine for everybody.
Christopher Henry Dawson
A tavern chair is the throne of human felicity.
Samuel Johnson
It's our version of "me" that causes us the most stress and heartache. Which is why it comes as a relief to discover that this version is as transient as a cloud in the sky. Focus on the cloud and the result is uncertain. Focus on the sky and we discover clarity.
David Michie
There is no money in poetry, but then there is no poetry in money.
Robert Graves
At best he read popular science magazines like the Scientific American he had now, to keep himself up-to-date, in layman's terms, with physics generally. But even then his concentration was marred, for a lifetime's habit made him inconveniently watchful for his own name. He saw it as if in bold. It could leap out at him from an unread double page of small print, and sometimes he could sense it coming before the page turn.
Ian McEwan
The world is not made of bread and honey…nor of the sweet flesh of girls. This world is made of clouds and of the shadows of clouds. It is made of mental landscapes, porous as air, where men and women are as trees walking, and as reeds shaken by the wind.
John Cowper Powys