Quotes by British Authors - Page 50

I was quite depressed two weeks ago when I spent an afternoon at Brentano's Bookshop in New York and was looking at the kind of books most people read. Once you see that you lose all hope.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Partially undermining the manufacturer's ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles. Why had the grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their responsibilities? Were there not more important ambitions to be met before Death showed himself on the horizon in his hooded black cloak, his scythe slung over his shoulder?
Alain de Botton
A terrible sadness threatened to overwhelm me as I wondered how two people capable of such love for each other had eventually felt so little for the child they had produced between them.
Toni Maguire
I’m not punishing you.’ ‘No?’ ‘No. You’d know if I was. Trust me.
Lindsay J. Pryor
I'm going to lie down. Please wake me up in a couple of don't.
Ruby Elliot
The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.
Samuel Johnson
People who get up early in the morning cause war, death and famine.
Banksy
Is it foolish to care for non-existent folk?Then, leave me to my foolishness.
Piers Anthony
I must strive to see only God in my friends, and God in my cats.
Florence Nightingale
Do not try to be humble: learn humility.
Idries Shah
Between 60 and 80 percent of strippers come from a background of sexual abuse.
Caitlin Moran
Surely,” he said, “the great mountains of the world are a present remedy if men did but know it against our modern discontent and ambitions. In the hills is wisdom’s fount. They are deep in time. They know the ways of the sun and the wind, the lightning’s fiery feet, the frost that shattereth, the rain that shroudeth, the snow that putteth about their nakedness a softer coverlet than fine lawn.
E.R. Eddison
I did what I had to do. Now he's motivated.""Yeah, sure, motivated to s**t his pants maybe," Luke pointed out.
Amanda Steel
It is a dull sensation, your heart breaking, like the sound of a pebble dropping on the sand. Not a shattering, not a tearing apart, there is nothing shrill or grandiose about the sensation. It is merely an internal realization that something treasured you never knew you had is leaving forever.
Samantha Bruce-Benjamin
The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.
Dorothy L. Sayers
I who know many present things by my art," replied the Hermit with a smile, "have yet little knowledge of things future. Therefore I do not know whether any man or woman or beast in the whole world will be alive when the sun sets tonight. But be of good hope. The damsel is likely to live as long as any her age.
C.S. Lewis
the general trouble with ignorance is always that ignorant people have no idea that that’s what they are. You can be ignorant and stupid and go through your whole life without ever encountering any evidence against the hypothesis that you’re a genius. If you’re stupid you can always blame miscalculation on bad luck.
Louis de Bernières
But what really happens after you are dead - that is what I want to know?I cannot tell you Renisenb. You should ask a priest these questions.He would just give me the usual answers. I want to know.We shall none of us know until we are dead ourselves.
Agatha Christie
We three alone have the speed, skill and power to do what must be done', said Grimalkin. 'You have the Destiny Blade and Bone Cutter — in addition to the talents inherited from your mother. Alice wields powerful magic, and I am Grimalkin.
Joseph Delaney
Hood an ass with reverend purple. So you can hide his two ambitious ears and he shall pass for a cathedral doctor.
Ben Jonson
Men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually wracked with pain.
Philip Pullman
Is it ghosts that truly haunt us, or the memory of our own mistakes that we wish we could undo?
Laura Lam
Whisper it softly, but many Greeks, including clergy, welcomed the Ottomans. On the whole Muslim rulers have been much more tolerant of infidels than their Christian counterparts have. As long as their subjects paid taxes and provided recruits to the harems and armies of the Sultan, they could have whatever religion they liked. Only when they joined religion with revolt did scimitars and stakes come out. Orthodox Christianity was under far greater threat from the Roman variety imposed by Venetians and Franks and Catalans. Jews too were safer from pogrom under the crescent than the cross. This is not a line of thought that goes down well in Greek company.
John Mole
Never let your uniqueness be compromised
Benny Bellamacina
My love, wherever you are - whatever you are - don't lose faith. I know it's gonna happen someday to you.
Morrissey
We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretense of understanding. We paper over the voids of our comprehension with science and religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across the surfaces, heedless of the depths below. Dragonflies flitting over a lake, miles deep, pursuing erratic paths to pointless ends. Until that moment when something from the cold unknown reaches up to take us.The biggest lies we save for ourselves. We play a game in which we are gods, in which we make choices, and the current follows in our wake. We pretend a separation from the wild. Pretend that a man’s control runs deep, that civilization is more than a veneer, that reason will be our companion in dark places.
Mark Lawrence
As for the problem of overproduction, which has been latent in our society since the development of the machine technique, it is solved by the device of continuous warfare, which is also useful in keying up public morale to the necessary pitch....The problem, that is to say, is educational. It is a problem of continuously molding the consciousness both of the directing group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately below it. The consciousness of the masses needs only to be influenced in a negative way.
George Orwell
Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.
Jeanette Winterson
There is always that choice, the light or the dark
Julia Green
Live your dreams, not your fears! A.Hume
Albina Hume
Verily, a man should not cling to those who have passed, for he will likely neglect service to the living.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Every new dayOur children's joy is as fresh as roses,Even the birds chatter at dawn.
Scott Hastie
A man can believe in a considerable deal of rubbish and yet go about his daily work in a rational and cheerful manner.
Norman Douglas
I barged through the palace, dripping a trail of blood behind me as I held the dead bird by the neck.
Alwyn Hamilton
(Ulrich, 100 year old Bulgarian man): in Solo, by Rana Dasgupta"Ulrich has sometimes wondered whether his life has been a failure. Once he would have looked at all this and said yes. But now he does not know what it means for a life to succeed or fail. How can a dog fail its life, or a tree? A life is just a quantity; and he can no more see failure in it than he can see failure in a pile of earth, or a bucket of water. Failure and success are foreign terms to such blind matter." (p. 160)
Rana Dasgupta
...action is in fact knowledge in operation. Right action stems from right knowledge. Right knowledge is acquired through the teacher.
Idries Shah
The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with faith to fight for it
Aneurin Bevan
You don’t have to solve it, only evolve it!
Silvia Hartmann
I would have gone too but I wanted to come straight back to you.I kept thinking of you, waiting here, all by yourself, not knowing what was going to happen.
Daphne du Maurier
Do what is right and be prepared to pay the price.
Christopher Taylor
I am tempted to find reason and justice in the fact that he died as violently and indecently as he lived. But that is too ingenuous a way out. It does not explain Dimitrios; it only apologizes for him. Special sorts of conditions must exist for the creation of the special sort of criminal that he typified...all I do know is that while might is right, while chaos and anarchy masquerade as order and enlightenment, those conditions will obtain.
Eric Ambler
Perhaps the greatest danger in the way that alternative therapists behave is simply the promotion of their own treatments when patients should be in the care of a conventional doctor. There are numerous reports of patients with serious conditions (e.g. diabetes, cancer, AIDS) suffering harm after following irresponsible advice form alternative practitioners instead of following the advice of a doctor.
Simon Singh
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
Richard Dawkins
Casting my own eye down Fifth Avenue as my belly swelled, I would register with incredulity: Every one of these people came from a woman's cunt.
Lionel Shriver
I mean that it's all right to go to bed with an asshole but don't ever have a baby with one.
David Gilmour
Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.
George Eliot
Hot passion is a bit like infatuation – it burns brightly, but fades quickly.
David Hieatt
They sang that song which distills all the suffering and the hope of Africa; that song which had inspired and comforted so many, “Nkosi Sikeleli Afrika,” God Bless Africa, give her life, watch over her children.
Alexander McCall Smith
A large proportion of mankind, like pigeons and partridges, on reaching maturity, having passed through a period of playfulness or promiscuity, establish what they hope and expect will be a permanent and fertile mating relationship. This we call marriage.
C.D. Darlington
Maxim's voice, clear and strong, "Will someone take my wife outside?She is going to faint.
Daphne du Maurier
Marriages are like pianos. They go in and out of tune.
Sarah Waters
Use your little grey cells mon ami" (Hercule Poirot in 'The Mysterious Affair At Styles')
Agatha Christie
CUSTOMER (to their friend): God, the Famous Five titles realy were crap, weren’t they? Five Go Camping. Five Go Off in a Caravan.... If it was Five Go Down To a Crack House it might be a bit more exciting.
Jen Campbell
...Dickey Perrott, you Jago whelp, look at them - look hard. Some day if you are clever - cleverer than anyone in the Jago right now - if you're only scoundrel enough, and brazen enough, and lucky enough - one of a thousand - maybe you'll be like them: bursting with high living, drunk when you like, red and pimply. There it is - that's your aim in life - there's your pattern. Learn to read and write, learn all you can, learn cunning, spare nobody and stop at nothing, and perhaps - It's the best the world has for you, for the Jago's got you, and that's the only way out, except gaol and the gallows. So do your devil most, or God help you, Dicky Perrot - though he wont: for the Jago's got you!
Arthur Morrison
Gabriel Oak: "It's time for you to fight your own battles... and win them too.
Thomas Hardy
We are betrayed by what is false within.
George Meredith
You smiled then, and your whole face changed with it. It kind of lit up, like there were sunbeams coming from inside you.
Lucy Christopher
My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest.
Charles Dickens
And who among the company at Monseigneur's reception in that seventeen hundred and eightieth year of our Lord, could possibly doubt, that a system rooted in a frizzled hangman, powdered, gold-laced, pumped, and white-silk stockinged, would see the very stars out!
Charles Dickens
I allowed myself the supernatural, the transcendent, because, I told myself, our love of metaphor is pre-religious, born of our need to express what is inexpressible, our dreams of otherness, of more.
Salman Rushdie