Quotes by British Authors - Page 76

I put in no claims either for happiness, for gratification, or even for the common comforts of life: yet, surely, I had a right to exist!
Mary Hays
Only debt is forever.
Charles Stross
Each mistake teaches you something new about yourself. There is no failure, remember, except in no longer trying. It is the courage to continue that counts.
Chris Bradford
A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it
Roald Dahl
Setting the stage for the Tower of Babel, the author says that, while humanity had a mission to reflect God, it had been distracted by its own reflection and was both fascinated and fearful of what it saw.
N.T. Wright
Gods didn’t mind atheists, if they were deep, hot, fiery, atheists like Simony, who spend their whole life hating gods for not existing. That sort of atheism was a rock. It was nearly belief …
Terry Pratchett
What is the sweetness of flowers compared to the savour of dust and confinement?
Peter Ackroyd
Something was nagging at me that I was trying to resist. Was it then or was it later that the thought came to me: if God really does exist, and is not just a myth, it must have a consequence for the whole of life. It was not a comfortable thought.
Jennifer Worth
In faith and hope the world will disagree but all mankind's concern is charity.
Alexander Pope
We all need something that takes us out of day to day and reminds us that it's all ok."
Ian Tucker
So many men and women I have wronged, reduced to ghosts and shades. They surround me, but I can never let them know I regret what I have cost them, both the living and the dead.
Laura Lam
LinesI die but when the grave shall pressThe heart so long endeared to theeWhen earthy cares no more distressAnd earthy joys are nought to me.Weep not, but think that I have pastBefore thee o'er the sea of gloom.Have anchored safe and rest at lastWhere tears and mouring can not come.'Tis I should weep to leave thee hereOn that dark ocean sailing drearWith storms around and fears beforeAnd no kind light to point the shore.But long or short though life may be'Tis nothing to eternity.We part below to meet on highWhere blissful ages never die.
Emily Brontë
Though we longed not to be lonely, we also feared the pain it would take us to be brought out of our lonely states. And after that fear, could we be guaranteed that we would never be returned to a state of loneliness again? We could not.
Edward Carey
We can all be clockmakers, or astronomers. But if we all wanted to be Pushkin. . .if the question is, how do you make a poem by Pushkin?- or, what exactly makes one poem or painting or piece of music greater than another?- or, what is beauty?, or liberty?, or virtue?- if the question is, how should we live?. . . then, reason gives no answer or different answers. So something went wrong. The divine spark in man is not reason after all, but something else, some kind of intuition or vision, perhaps like the moment of inspiration experienced by the artist . . .
Tom Stoppard
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Aldous Huxley
No", she wanted to say. " I don't want you to care for me, I want to be with my husband." But nothing came out. She turned beseeching her eyes to Darcy and she saw him as if from a great distance, through a distorting glass, but his words were firm and clear. “She has no taste for your company,” he said.“No?” said the gentleman. “But I have a taste for her.”Hers, thought Elizabeth. He should have said hers.“Let her go,” said Darcy warningly.“Why should I?” asked the gentleman.“Because she is mine,” said Darcy.The gentleman turned his full attention toward Darcy and Elizabeth followed his eyes.And then she saw something that made her heart thump against her rib cage and her mind collapse as she witnessed something so shocking and so terrifying that the ground came up to meet her as everything went black.
Amanda Grange
Can I have a look at Uranus too, Lavender?
J.K. Rowling
Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.
H.G.Wells
Whoa, that's the kind of little sister I can dig!" said Edison."Yes, we're all alike," I said. "We cover for you, we lie for you, we take the heat for you. We clean up your messes and mollify our parents for you. We never fail to come across with undying adoration, whether or not you deserve it, and we can't take our lives as seriously as yours. We snuffle up the crumbs from your table on the rare occasions you notice we're alive.
Lionel Shriver
Buy old masters. They fetch a better price than old mistresses.
Lord Beaverbrook
A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.
Anthony Burgess
Those who are most sincere are also the most morally suspect, as well as being incapable of producing or appreciating wit.
Ian M. Banks
The function of a nutrient is to become transmuted, not to leave unaltered traces.
Idries Shah
Your son is heir to an enormous fortune and name. Someone would be bound to bid for you him and take him as his ward.
Philippa Gregory
[T]he success of every novel -- if it's a novel of action -- depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, "What are my big scenes?" and then get every drop of juice out of them.", Issue 64, Winter 1975)
P.G. Wodehouse
Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things.
Colin Wilson
God, thought Ross, it does work, and unfairly; but I want her, not any other, not the most beautiful eighteen-year-old damsel born out of a sea-shell, not the most seductive houri of any sultan's harem; I want her with her familiar gestures and her shining smile and her scarred knees, and I know she wants me in just the same way, and if there's any happiness more complete than this I don't know it and am not sure I even want it.
Winston Graham
A whetstone, though it cannot cut, may sharpen a knife that will.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Must not understanding lie open unto wisdom as the pyramids lie open to the stars? (6:2)
Aleister Crowley
It never leaves, not with someone we love. Their presence burns too vivid in our memories. Happen that is as it should be, for otherwise we would too easy forget.
Helen Hollick
A beautiful woman is like a painting and remains beautiful no matter how old she is.
Chloe Thurlow
Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
Douglas Adams
She checked herself in the mirror. She was a roadmap of violence.
Simon Wood
As the beautiful does not exist for the artist and poet alone—though these can find in it more poignant depths of meaning than other men—so the world of Reality exists for all; and all may participate in it, unite with it, according to their measure and to the strength and purity of their desire.
Evelyn Underhill
And I have fitted up some chambers thereLooking towards the golden Eastern air,And level with the living winds, which flowLike waves above the living waves below.—I have sent books and music there, and allThose instruments with which high spirits callThe future from its cradle, and the pastOut of its grave, and make the present lastIn thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die,Folded within their own eternity.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
She always paid attention to fingers rather than faces because they told so much more. People remembered to guard their faces. They forgot their hands. Her own were small, though strong and supple from all the hours of piano playing, but what use was that now? For the first time she understood what real danger does to the human mind, as flat white fear froze the coils of her brain.
Kate Furnivall
Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.
Elizabeth von Arnim
STAR: My dad always told me that life will keep on kicking you if you let it. You’ve got to keep moving, and you’ve got to not look back.
Sam Crescent
Are you keeping up your good studies at school and working as hard as you always did?
Diane Samuels
The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good? If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselves good, and that whatever else is good, is not so as an end, but as a mean, the formula may be accepted or rejected, but is not a subject of what is commonly understood by proof.
John Stuart Mill
What was supposed to be so special about a full moon? It was only a big circle of light. And the dark of the moon was only darkness. But halfway between the two, when the moon was between the worlds of light and dark, when even the moon lived on the edge...maybe then a witch could believe in the moon.
Terry Pratchett
Clarity and simplicity help us to build confidence keep things clear and keep them simple.
Sam Owen
The word “consciousness,” it seems to me, can only refer to what one might define provisionally as “the knowing that cannot know itself without intermediary and that cannot function in experience (of which it is an indispensable component) except negatively.”To the question “What is consciousness,” then, a low level provisional answer might be “It is the pure subjective” or “It is the bare knowing of what it is not that constitutes (orders) experience and allows it being.” It must be added that, when consciousness is, it seems to be individualized by what it knows. But on another (higher) level the “is” in the question has still to be questioned, and so the low-level (and logical) answer is only a conventional makeshift, a conventional view, nothing more. And this qualification applies not only to logically inductive and deductive statements necessitating use of the word “is,” but also to descriptive statements that appear in “logical” form, using that term, or any equivalent.
Nanamoli Thera
There can never be surprises in logic.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
If I am right, Thy grace impartStill in the right to stay;If I am wrong, O, teach my heartTo find that better way!
Alexander Pope
As the social matrix becomes increasingly subject to rapid fluctuations, throwing out anchors into a collectivised past becomes more prominent than movement into a future. The desire to establish a core identity within the profusion of styles has led to image building becoming an industry in itself—as much reflected by the tactics of political groups and corporate bodies, as in the fetishistic scramble for designer labels and trendy occult symbols. Identity has, therefore, become another commodity to be traded in the marketplace. The gulf between objective icons and the Illusory has widened to such an extent that illusions have come to equal value.
Phil Hine
And though history sadly doesn't credit the man who first thought of tilting a bicycle's steering axis, it is more likely to be because of feet striking the wheel than an understanding of stability.
Robert Penn
We all want progress, but if you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
C.S. Lewis
So I don’t think I’ll make Poet Laureate,but I swear I’m not twisted and bitter,If finely-wrought talentsdon’t weigh in the balance,I can always write haiku on Twitter.
Rosy Cole
Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his expectation, that the senate and the people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedoms.
Edward Gibbon
What sort of world is it at all? Men on the moon and men spinning round the earth like it might be midges round a lamp, and there's not no attention paid to earthly law nor order no more.
Anthony Burgess
Ultimately not one amongst usWill ever be denied that,The glimmer of a chance to shine.
Scott Hastie
Despair is criminal.
Samuel Johnson
[H]e initially conceived of Olivier as a man of the greatest promise destroyed by a fatal flaw, the unreasoning passion for a woman dissolving into violence, desperately weakening everything he tried to do. For how could learning and poetry be defended when it produced such dreadful results and was advanced by such imperfect creatures? At least Julien did not see the desperate fate of the ruined lover as a nineteenth-century novelist or a poet might have done, recasting the tale to create some appealing romantic hero, dashed to pieces against the unyielding society that produced him. Rather, his initial opinion -- held almost to the last -- was of Olivier as a failure, ruined by a terible weakness.
Iain Pears
Because there is a word for perfection, people will always imagine that they know it.
Idries Shah
Maybe she's preemptively getting her karmic backlash for that, but there's something icky about all this. Yes, the "hello, boys" chest like two friendly chinchillas, Bigfoot ball stomper Lara Croft was oversexualized, but this is still sexualization from the opposite, somehow even creepier side of the coin. At least that Tyrannosaurus in the first game never tried to feel her up.
Yahtzee Croshaw
The idea of a divine creator belittles the elegant reality of the universe.
Richard Dawkins
In the mind of all, fiction, in the logical sense, has been the coin of necessity;—in that of poets of amusement—in that of the priest and the lawyer of mischievous immorality in the shape of mischievous ambition,—and too often both priest and lawyer have framed or made in part this instrument.
Jeremy Bentham
When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists? Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless.
Bertrand Russell
My mum always said things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end. If not always in the ways we expect". -Luna lovegood( Harry potter and the order of the phenoix)
J.K. Rowling