Quotes by British Authors - Page 62

There is no exception to this rule: "All the paths of the LORD are mercy and truth unto such as keep his covenant." They say there is no rule without an exception, but there is an exception to that rule.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Every action we take everything we do is either a victory or defeat in the struggle to become what we want to be.
Anne Brontë
Have trembled beneath the pressure of a light beam.
Jay Woodman
the sense of a small courageous community barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits - love was an arm round the neck, a cramped embrace in the smoke, wealth a little pile of palm-nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a few stones in the centre of the village where the dead chiefs lay, a grove of trees where the rice birds, like yellow and green canaries, built their nests, a man in a mask with raffia skirts dancing at burials. This never varied, only their kindness to strangers, the extent of their poverty and the immediacy of their terrors. Their laughter and their happiness seemed the most courageous things in nature
Graham Greene
It is one of the saddest spectacles of our time to see a great democratic movement support a policy which must lead to the destruction of democracy and which meanwhile can benefit only a minority of the masses who support it. Yet it is this support from the Left of the tendencies toward monopoly which make them so irresistible and the prospects of the future so dark.
Friedrich A. Hayek
I'm a universal patriot...my country is the world.
Charlotte Brontë
He was as obsequious as a Japanese ivy plant. Wringing his hands as if he hoped to squeeze the milk of human kindness from his fingernails, ...
Philip Kerr
Cherish the fabulous, the fantastic, the beautiful, the graceful, the moments of abandon, laughter, quirkiness. Cherish the tiny incredible details, the gigantic & varied display, and the infinite depths - of life.
Jay Woodman
I think about stories and their logic and wonder if there can be any such thing as simply "there is a book.
Scarlett Thomas
The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless—one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan’s will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite’s will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is—well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.
G.K. Chesterton
Beauty is an ecstacy it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it.
W Somerset Maugham
Happy is the people that is without history. And thrice is the people without sociology.
Christopher Henry Dawson
Yet, I believe that my experience of depression has helped me to be a more humane and understanding therapist. Psychiatrists get depressed too, more often than other doctors. Being an expert in depression doesn't confer any immunity from it and I am aware that I don't have all the answers.
Linda Gask
Their friendship was like a wilted bunch of flowers that she insisted on topping up with water. Why not let it die instead? It was unrealistic to expect a friendship to last forever…
David Nicholls
Happiness lies in the fulfillment of the spirit through the body.
Cyril Connolly
Friendship is a strong and habitual inclination in two persons to promote the good and happiness in another.
Eustace Budgell
More water will flow before we join StarClan. This is not an end. This is a beginning. You will need the courage of a lion to face this journey.
Erin Hunter
You cannot, ever, give up on a friend who is close to giving up on themselves
Jodi Ann Bickley
When avarice takes the lead in a state, it is commonly the forerunner of its fall.
Alexander Hamilton
With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.
William Wordsworth
Well, a man can but hold fast to what he believes right, and even the opponent he baulks should value him for that.
Ellis Peters
Like will to like each creature loves his kind.
Robert Herrick
Heaven. The biggest waste of our time we ever invented, outside jigsaws.
Caitlin Moran
The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way is the one that achieves madness.
Mick Jagger
A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment.
Douglas Adams
I had wanted to compromise with Fate: to escape occasional great agonies by submitting to a whole life of privation and small pains.
Charlotte Brontë
Be yourself. Don't worry about what other people are thinking of you, because they're probably feeling the same kind of scared, horrible feelings that everyone does.
Phil Lester
Small children believe themselves to be gods, or some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes along with their way of seeing things.
Neil Gaiman
If you write about a place, you need to be right about the place!
Laurence Bradbury
You light the Spark in my Bonfire Heart.
James Blunt
A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.
Salman Rushdie
Living by faith includes the call to something greater than cowardly self-preservation.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Destiny was funny stuff, he knew. You couldn’t trust it. Often you couldn’t even see it. Just when you knew you had it cornered, it turned out to be something else—coincidence, maybe, or providence. You barred the door against it, and it was standing behind you. Then just when you thought you had it nailed down it walked away with the hammer.
Terry Pratchett
What you take from the earth, you must give back. That's nature's way.
Chris d'Lacey
If I have put the case of science at all correctly, the reader will have recognised that modern science does much more than demand that it shall be left in undisturbed possession of what the theologian and metaphysician please to term its 'legitimate field'. It claims that the whole range of phenomena, mental as well as physical-the entire universe-is its field. It asserts that the scientific method is the sole gateway to the whole region of knowledge.
Karl Pearson
One should not confuse creativity with whining.
Silvia Hartmann
The creative journey is not a trek through the wilderness, but actually a clearly defined path, which though not visible to our outside eyes, can be felt with our inner senses.
Lucy H. Pearce
An event is not any more intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves. For a man who does not believe in a miracle, a slow miracle would be just as incredible as a swift one. The Greek witch may have turned sailors to swine with a stroke of the wand. But to see a naval gentleman of our acquaintance looking a little more like a pig every day, till he ended with four trotters and a curly tail, would not be any more soothing. It might be rather more creepy and uncanny.
G.K. Chesterton
We are not so different, and yet we are worlds apart." Ahkeel/Akil, The Veil Series prequel.
Pippa DaCosta
There is a patent conflict between the need to reverse or at least to control the impact of our economy on the biosphere and the imperatives of a capitalist market: maximum continuing growth in the search for profit.
Eric Hobsbawm
There are books showing men how to succeed in everything they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books.
G.K. Chesterton
Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hears men's real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil?
G.K. Chesterton
There are few things worse than mistaking an enemy for a friend.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Honouring the youth of their town they provided a décor that a £20-a-Martini fleecing parlour could not have amortized. They had bought eighty low Alvar Aalto stools for the alcove and coctail bar seating. Also, twenty tall numbers in the same bent bleach wood classic style. Extremely expensive and brought in from Finland at equally great expense.And in the first twelve months, ninety percent had disappeared. Compared to the catastrophic damage done every other week to one of the toilets just off the main dance floor --the level of masonry demolition going deep into the floor implied the use of a full-sized pneumatic drill-- the loss of a bunch of stools was incidental.The fact that thirty-two then turned up in New Order's rehearsal room was therefore coincidental. If you couldn't join in the public in stealing from your own club, what was the point of opening it?
Tony Wilson
When you view yourself through the lens of God’s Word, you will better understand God’s love for you and the worth you have in His eyes.
Elizabeth George
Am I about to discover where you, Ron, and Hermione disappeared to while you were supposed to be in the back room of Fred and George's shop?''How did you...?''Harry, please. You're talking to the man who raised Fred and George.
J.K. Rowling
I hadn't thought that as well as the obvious fears about money, and your future, losing your job would make you feel inadequate, and a bit useless. That it would be harder to get up in the morning then when you were rudely shocked into consciousness by the alarm. That you might miss the people you worked with, no matter how little you had in common with them. Or even that you might find yourself searching for familiar faces as you walked the high street.
Jojo Moyes
There were no footmarks.''Meaning that you saw none?''I assure you, sir, that there were none.''My good Hopkins, I have investigated many crimes, but I have never yet seen one which was committed by a flying creature. As long as the criminal remains upon two legs so long must there be some indentation, some abrasion, some trifling displacement which can be detected by the scientific searcher.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Jesus lived in occupied territory, in poverty and misery, and his stories and preaching are all about food, land, liberation from bondage and servitude and get. He preached about providing for those who lacked the most and were considered expendable, as the birds of the air, and yet in Jesus' eyes were where one found the treasure of heaven, here, now, on earth.
Megan McKenna
But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.''In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy.' 'All right then,' said the Savage defiantly, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.''Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.' There was a long silence. 'I claim them all,' said the Savage at last.Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. 'You're welcome," he said.
Aldous Huxley
We are all inclined to accept conventional forms or colours as the only correct ones. Children sometimes think that stars must be star-shaped, though naturally they are not. The people who insist that in a picture the sky must be blue, and the grass green, are not very different from these children. They get indignant if they see other colours in a picture, but if we try to forget all we have heard about green grass and blue skies, and look at the world as if we had just arrived from another planet on a voyage of discovery and were seeing it for the first time, we may find that things are apt to have the most surprising colours.
E.H. Gombrich
I know there's a proverb which that says 'To err is human,' but a human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries.
Agatha Christie
What you have made me see,' answered the Lady, 'is as plain as the sky, but I never saw it before. Yet is has happened every day. One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one’s mind. Then, may it be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before–that the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished–if it were possible to wish–you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other.
C.S. Lewis
It gives him spiritual freedom. To him life is a tragedy and by his gift of creation he enjoys the catharsis a purging of pity and terror, Which Aristotle tells is the object of art. Everything is transformed by his power into material and by writing it he can overcome it. Everything is grist to his mill. ... The artist is the only free man.
W Somerset Maugham
Oh, what a lovely owl!" Cried the Wart.But when he went up to it and held out his hand, the owl grew half as tall again, stood up as stiff as a poker, closed its eyes so that there was only the smallest slit to peep through - as you are in the habit of doing when told to shut your eyes at hide-and-seek - and said in a doubtful voice"There is no owl."Then it shut its eyes entirely and looked the other way."It is only a boy," said Merlyn."There is no boy," said the owl hopefully, without turning round.
T.H. White
They had no conversation together, no intercourse but what the commonest civility required. Once so much to each other! Now nothing! There had been a time, when of all the large party now filling the drawing-room at Uppercross, they would have found it most difficult to cease to speak to one another. With the exception, perhaps, of Admiral and Mrs. Croft, who seemed particularly attached and happy, (Anne could allow no other exception even among the married couples) there could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so simliar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become aquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.
Jane Austen
Harry was left to ponder in silence the depths to which girls would sink to get revenge.
J.K. Rowling
We need heroes, however outlandish, because although we might not be slaying real dragons, we all have our quests.
Russ Thorne
A life which has never been laid open in penitence and faith before God has little permanence in eternity.
R.K. Harrison
Knowledge and book learning are not wisdom," said the captain."Is this book wisdom?" asked Lucy, putting the manuscript back on the table."It has some elements of wisdom in it, me dear," replied the captain. "I did not lead a very wise life myself but it was a full one and a grown-up one. You come to age very often through shipwreck and disaster, and at the heart of the whirlpool some men find God.
R.A. Dick