Quotes by British Authors - Page 64

Man does not necessarily begin with despotism because he is barbarous, but very often finds his way to despotism because he is civilised. He finds it because he is experienced; or, what is often much the same thing, because he is exhausted
G.K. Chesterton
[I]f a book is well written, I always find it too short.
Jane Austen
Good to forgive Best to forget.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
Let's face it there's lots of spoiled kids out there . . . because you can't spank Grandma.
Janet Anderson
What our deepest self craves is not mere enjoyment but some supreme purpose that will enlist all our powers and give unity and direction to our life.
Henry J. Golding
Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.
Virginia Woolf
Going to work for a large company is like getting on a train. Are you going sixty miles an hour or is the train going sixty miles an hour and you're just sitting still?
Paul Getty
The things that are essential to salvation are so exceedingly simple that no child need sit down in despair of understanding the things which make for his peace. Christ crucified is not a riddle for sages, but a plain truth for plain people. True it is meat for men, but it is also milk for babes.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
At times, Melete continued, it had seemed to her that this fact was what had created this behavior. Her sense of reality, in other words, had created something outside itself that mocked and hated her. But as I say, she said, those thoughts belong to the world of religious sensibility, which has become in our times the language of neurosis.
Rachel Cusk
He who gives back at first repulse and without striking the second blow, despairs success, has never been, is not, and never will be, a hero in love, war or business. - Frederick Tudor
Gavin Weightman
Oh, are you doing magic? Let’s see it, then.”She sat down. Ron looked taken aback.“Er — all right.”He cleared his t
J.K. Rowling
It comes from history. It comes from the record of the Inquisition, persecuting heretics and torturing Jews and all that sort of stuff; and it comes from the other side, too, from the Protestants burning the Catholics. It comes from the insensate pursuit of innocent and crazy old women, and from the Puritans in America burning and hanging the witches — and it comes not only from the Christian church but also from the Taliban. Every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don't accept him. Wherever you look in history, you find that. It’s still going on.
Philip Pullman
Trying not to believe things when in your heart you are almost sure they are true, is as bad for the temper as anything I know.
E Nesbit
Hopper’s paintings are full of women like her; women who appear to be in the grips of a loneliness that has to do with gender and unattainable standards of appearance, and that gets increasingly toxic and strangulating with age.
Olivia Laing
... It is not possible, says Weber, to confer the objective validity of facts on the basis of a value-judgement; and second, it is not possible to judge the value of values through the use of scientific reason. This leads him to maintain a distinction between science and ethics, the former dealing with questions of fact, the latter with questions of value.
Nicholas Gane
Everything man sees he takes for a toy. 'Thus is he always, forever a boy.
Jessie Burton
It is not a brave thing to trust God. To true believers, it is a sweet necessity.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Hello, my name is your potential. But you can call me impossible. I am the missed opportunities. I am the expectations you will never fulfill. I am always taunting you, regardless of how hard you try, regardless of how much you hope.
Nathan Filer
How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny sefishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they are not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.
G.K. Chesterton
Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.
Jeanette Winterson
When I hold you in my arms, I live inside your rainbow and you live inside mine.
Anthony T.Hincks
People talk about ‘service, effort, love, knowledge’. But with knowledge you know what love is, and what it is not.
Idries Shah
Tell me about yourself.' A strange thing for a husband to ask a wife.
Janet Mullany
Life's a queue of small irritations with the Last Door at the end.
Joe Abercrombie
Numbers 12: 6 - 8When there is a prophet among you, I, the Lord, reveal myself to them in visions, I speak to them in dreams. But this is not true of my servant Moses; he is faithful in all my house. With him I speak face to face, clearly and not in riddles; he sees the form of the Lord.So, unless you're Moses, this verse makes it obvious that God will not always speak clearly. Often he speaks softly and in riddles. He will reveal something supernaturally to us, but it's always something we need to pay close attention to. We usually need to then carefully interpret and apply what we hear. We are convinced that God's motivation behind this - as with all he does - is to draw us into relationship.
Mike Pilavachi
The gods, not out of mercy, have made me strong.
C.S. Lewis
If we are to climb that mountain, we had better find that molehill.
Anthony T.Hincks
It is so pleasant to come across people more stupid than ourselves. We love them at once for being so.
Jerome K. Jerome
The phenomena of nature, especially those that fall under the inspection of the astronomer, are to be viewed, not only with the usual attention to facts as they occur, but with the eye of reason and experience.
William Herschel
Tragically, because many addicts are not given sufficient love, nurturing and non-shaming dialogue at crucial stages in their early emotional development, they are on a quest to find contentment from a source outside of themselves. Their parents might have provided bountifully for them; however, their parents were never fully emotionally present while parenting, which made their children feel starved of emotional nourishment.
Christopher Dines
Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes.
Oliver Sacks
The Creator has – I say it in all reverence - drawn a myriad red herrings across the track, but the true scientist refuses to be baffled by superficial appearances in detecting the secrets of Nature. The vulgar herd catches at the gross apparent fact, but the man of insight knows what lies on the surfaces does lie.
Israel Zangwill
The family is the basis of society. As the family is, so is the society, and it is human beings who make a family-not the quantity of them, but the quality of them.
Ashley Montagu
Like many who'd married in the war, my parents were finding it hard to survive the peace. This wasn't because they had discovered that they didn't love each other once their life together wasn't spiced with constant separations and the threat of death. Far from it. But they hadn't chosen each other so much against the social grain that they were tense, self-conscious, embattled, as though something was supposed to go wrong. Their families didn't like their marriage, nor did the village.
Lorna Sage
I have never found in a long experience of politics that criticism is ever inhibited by ignorance.
Harold Macmillan
Loyalty is still the same, whether it win or lose the game; true as a dial to the sun, although it be not shined upon.
Samuel Butler
If you change who you are to suit other people, you may end up dressed for the wrong occasion
Benny Bellamacina
While most people love certain species to pieces (e.g. cats and dogs), others are more loved in pieces (e.g. cows and pigs)
Mango Wodzak
You were unsure which pain is worse -- the shock of what happened or the ache for what never will.
Simon Van Booy
Another one of your quippy japes?
Jasper Fforde
What appears to be definite and precise does not belong to any acceptable reality. It is only the experiences, the queer previsions, the fleeting premonitions, that are real. Vague and insubstantial though they may appear to be, compared with anything else in the mists and shifting lights of Time theory, they loom up like mountains of iron ore.
J.B. Priestley
My father looked on in disbelief, overwhelmed that his son had been taught to eat glass and relish it.
Tahir Shah
Be patient, persistent and above all, believe.
Fennel Hudson
Nature seemed to me benign and good; I thought she loved me, outcast as I was; and I, who from man could anticipate only mistrust, rejection, insult, clung to her with filial fondness. To-night at least, I would be her guest-as I was her child; my mother would lodge me without money and without price.
Charlotte Brontë
But Demeseus, I have only begun. Do you see what this pure feeling ‘love’ can do to people? Just now, I know you wanted to take my head off. But if love is so pure, why do so many die in the name of love? It’s a poison. It enters your body and slowly makes you do impulsive things you wouldn’t normally do. People kill themselves because they want to be with their love. People kill others because they want to be with their love. And people kill their love because they want to be with their love. All in the name of love, but in the end, someone dies.
Charles Lee
I hated myself, and the part of me that was cowardly wished for a simple solution: an exchange of pain for forgiveness. But life didn’t work that way, and fucking up was forever.
Alexis Hall
She was no malleable, since frigid, substance upon which desires might be executed; she was not a true prostitute for she was the object on which men prostituted themselves.
Angela Carter
Society prepares the crime, the criminal commits it.
Henry Thomas Buckle
You mean you live down here?' Matilda asked.'I do', Miss Honey replied, but she said no more.Matilda had never once stopped to think about where Miss Honey might be living. She had always regarded her purely as a teacher, a person who turned up out of nowhere and taught at school and then went away again.
Roald Dahl
When I reach my mountain top I will step off and follow the clouds all the way to the top of the world.Once there, I'll probably keep going.Who knows?Perhaps I will meet God along the way.
Anthony T.Hincks
This condition in which women live is created out of, and defended by, a system of ideas represented by the world's religions, by psychoanalysis, by pornography, by sexology, by science and medicine and the social sciences.
Sheila Jeffreys
Don't waste your whole lifetime waiting for the perfect life when there's a perfectly good one within and right in front of you.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.
Philip Larkin
I was up really early. It was the day of my selection tests and interviews to become a Prison Officer. The recruitment process was an absolute joke ... Everyone could have travelled round the world seven fucking times before they hear[d] back from the Service's recruitment cowboys.
Ronnie Thompson
Now times had changed, and the inherited wisdom of the past had become folly.
Arthur C. Clarke
At the beginning of the war…I had to look in on the War Office, and in a room I found a fellow…What do you think he was doing…what the hell do you think he was doing? He was devising the ceremonial for the disbanding of a Kitchener battalion. You can’t say we were not prepared in one matter at least…. Well, the end of the show was to be: the adjutant would stand the battalion at ease; the band would play Land of Hope and Glory, and then the adjutant would say: There will be no more parades…. Don’t you see how symbolical it was—the band playing Land of Hope and Glory, and then the adjutant saying: There will be no more parades?…For there won’t. There won’t, there damn well won’t. No more Hope, no more Glory, no more parades for you and me any more. Nor for the country…nor for the world, I dare say… None… Gone… Napoo finny! No…more…parades!
Ford Madox Ford
So, if there are any couples here this evening having a secret extramarital affair, I encourage you to breed.
Alison Larkin
Revenge writing is a female genre. Men who have been left by women or made cuckolds by rivals either lick their wounds in humiliated silence or start the Trojan Wars. Having no other power or public voice, the betrayed woman reaches for her pen.
Frances Wilson
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is very important.
Bertrand Russell
What people intuitively grasped was the new efficiences in distribution, manufacturing, and marketing were changing the definition of what was commercially viable across the board. The best way to describe these forces is that they are turning unprofitable customers, products, and markets into profitable ones. Although this phenomenon is most obvious in entertainment and media, it's an easy leap to eBay to see it at work more broadly, from cars to crafts. Seen broadly, it's clear that the story of the Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance - what happens when the bottlenecks and stand between supply and demand in our culture start to disappear and everything becomes available to everyone.
Chris Anderson