Quotes by British Authors - Page 102

Never do anything as though you are a professional armature
Diane Shawe
We are all born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness. (p.9)
Ken Robinson
I'm going to bed, where I may die.
Diana Wynne Jones
It's unwise to be a backseat driver, passenger or bystander in your own life.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Fun is essential to mastering the serious side of life. It provides the balance that keeps us sane
Peter Nicholls
You have a powerful army, Kublai, but the best force is one you do not have to use.
Conn Iggulden
I always try to believe the best of everybody -it saves so much trouble.
Rudyard Kipling
Always be the very best you can be
Julie Hodgson
...a more open and honest appraisal of the true nature of Silicon Valley and its opportunities as well as the many problems.
David Welch
Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes you must do what is required.
Winston S. Churchill
Self-preservation and determination meant she could get away with anything. As her law-abiding, conventionally minded daughter, I secretly envied her this. She was not the clinging-vine type, nor one who could coax sugar from a lemon. Hers was the frontal attack with no inhibitions. She told the Nazis you could not trust Hitler, and they let her go. In the days of chaperones, she hitch-hiked a ride on a French destroyer along the coast of Crete; 'All quite proper, I had my cook with me,' she explained.
Mary Allsebrook
He loved me and didn't want me hurt. What was worse, he didn't even understand that I had the right to be hurt.
Rosemary Sutcliff
A man must choose his own way of life, and…it is only by following out one’s own bent that there can be the really harmonious life.” [In an interview conducted by Bram Stoker]
Winston S. Churchill
Where tradition tells us that people are best kept under control and denied freedom of expression and action, humanistic psychology argues for liberation, more open decision-making and a sharing of power and control.
Keith Tudor
Best be yourself, imperial, plain, and true.
Robert Browning
The future of fiction? he said. Maybe, she said. Will it have room for, you know, love & stuff? he said. Always, she said. OK then, he said.
Patrick Ness
You don't know much," he murmurs. "You know all the wrong things." "Wrong? Not to me." He shakes his head. He looks so sincere. "Try it," he whispers. A challenge, daring me, and he cocks his head to one side and smiles his crooked, dazzling smile. I gasp, and I'm Eve in the Garden of Eden, and he's the serpent, and I cannot resist.
E.L. James
Give Bethod a kick from me, once you have him under your boot.""That I will, unless he gets me under his.""Never easy, kicking upwards.
Joe Abercrombie
You may be cool under pressure and challenge, but can you be cool under success?
Robert Holden
For any scientist the real challenge is not to stay within the secure garden of the known but to venture out into the wilds of the unknown.
Marcus du Sautoy
A trap is only a trap if you don't know about it. If you know about it, it's a challenge.
China Miéville
To 'see both sides' of a problem is the surest way to prevent its complete solution. Because there are always more than two sides.
Idries Shah
These days no one challenges us,' he said. 'And because there is no challenge, there is no reason to work hard. And with no reason to work hard, we have all become lazy.
Tahir Shah
I think the oddest thing about the advanced people is that while they are always talking of things as problems, they have hardly any notion of what a real problem is. A real problem only occurs when there are admittedly disadvantages in all courses that can be pursued. If it is discovered just before a fashionable wedding that the Bishop is locked up in the coal-cellar, that is not a problem. It is obvious to anyone but an extreme anti-clerical or practical joker that the Bishop must be let out of the coal-cellar. But suppose the Bishop has been locked up in the wine-cellar, and from the obscure noises, sounds as of song and dance, etc., it is guessed that he has indiscreetly tested the vintages round him; then indeed we may properly say that there has arisen a problem; for upon the one hand, it is awkward to keep the wedding waiting, while, upon the other, any hasty opening of the door might mean an episcopal rush and scenes of the most unforeseen description.
G.K. Chesterton
Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) is a major problem from poorly tested products and it should be dealt with sooner rather than later by government regulators.
Steven Magee
It is quite common for people to focus on the problem rather than the solutions.
Steven Redhead
The problem with radiation research is that you are constantly battling the biological effects of delayed radiation complications.
Steven Magee
There is always a solution to every problem! Fishy
Lily Amis
College mostly makes people like bladders—just good for nothing but t’ hold the stuff as is poured into ‘em.
George Eliot
There are three types of student: The golden student pays and loans, the silver student pays but does not learn, the bronze student learns but does not pay.
J.C. McKeown
The last year of her college career was wheeling slowly round. She could see ahead her examination and her departure. She had the ash of disillusion gritting under her teeth. Would the next move turn out the same? Always the shining doorway ahead; and then, upon approach, always the shining doorway was a gate into another ugly yard, dirty and active and dead. Always the crest of the hill gleaming ahead under heaven: and then, from the top of the hill only another sordid valley full of amorphous, squalid activity.
D.H. Lawrence
The faces of your young people in general are not interesting—I don't mean the children, but the young men and women—and they are awkward and clownish in their manners, without the quaintness of the elder generation, who are the funniest old dears in the world." "They will all be quaint enough as they get older. You must remember the sort of life they lead. They get their notions very slowly, and they must have notions in their heads before they can show them on their faces.
Thomas Hughes
You see, at Rugby I was rather a great man. There one had a share in the ruling of 300 boys, and a good deal of responsibility; but here one has only just to take care of oneself, and keep out of scrapes; and that's what I never could do.
Thomas Hughes
You sound like a college freshman taking his first philosophy class way too seriously, but that's good.
Michael Grant
His teachings, said his disciple Musaeus, had one simple theme: 'Everything comes into being from the One and is resolved into the One again.
Ann Wroe
[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.
Alain de Botton
Unless people are prepared to declare themselves your enemies you have to hunt around for them.
Auberon Waugh
He looks around at his guests. All are prepared. A Latin grace; English would be his choice, but he will suit his company. Who cross themselves ostentatiously, in papist style. Who look at him, expectant. He shouts for the waiters. The doors burst open. Sweating men heave the platters to the table. It seems the meat is fresh, in fact not slaughtered yet. It is just a minor breach of etiquette. The company must sit and salivate. The Boleyns are laid at his hand to be carved.
Hilary Mantel
You must expect to make enemies.""I never expect to make anything else," he said.
Susan Kay
You have no enemies, you say? Alas, my friend, the boast is poor. He who has mingled in the fray of duty that the brave endure, must have made foes. If you have none, small is the work that you have done. You’ve hit no traitor on the hip. You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip. You’ve never turned the wrong to right. You’ve been a coward in the fight.
Charles Mackay
I suppose you can guess the whole story now? After all, it's a primitive story. A man had two enemies. He was a wise man. And so he discovered that two enemies are better than one.
G.K. Chesterton
Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post as soon as there is no enemy in the field.
John Stuart Mill
The Master: The cosmos without the Doctor scarcely bears thinking about.
Terrance Dicks
If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata--of creatures that worked like machines--would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.
C.S. Lewis
In order to know your enemy, you must become your enemy.
Chris Bradford
A motto of the human race: Let me do as I like, and give me approval as well.
Idries Shah
If I had free will, I would choose to be funnier.
Stephen Cave
You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage.
Terry Pratchett
I shall decide what I do. If you say my work is fighting, or healing, or exploring, or whatever you say, I'll always be thinking about it, and if I end up doing that, I'll feel resentful because it'll feel as I didn't have a choice, and if I don't do it, I'll feel guilty because I should. Whatever I do, I will choose it, no one else.
Philip Pullman
There's such a thing as free will, Tanner. You didn't have to go along with me, unless you want to admit your brain is ruled by your dick. And I didn't get the impression you regretted any of that.
Alastair Reynolds
Insofar as it is true, the idea that our actions or beliefs are merely one link in a causal link that runs back to the beginning of the universe is making a trivial claim. Insofar as it is saying something profound, the claim is untrue.
Kenan Malik
Unemployment or the loss of income which will always affect some in any society is certainly less degrading if it is the result of misfortune and not deliberately imposed by authority.
Friedrich A. Hayek
While people will submit to suffering which may hit anyone, they will not so easily submit to suffering which is the result of the decision of authority. It may be bad to be just a cog in an impersonal machine; but it is infinitely worse if we can no longer leave it, if we are tied to our place and to the superiors who have been chosen for us. Dissatisfaction of everybody with his lot will inevitably grow with the consciousness that it is the result of deliberate human decision.
Friedrich A. Hayek
I could not 'make' you--except by force, which would break your mind.
J.R.R. Tolkien
They say the best things in life are free, and they are if you can afford them.
Chloe Thurlow
I came home from work one day and felt compelled to write a book about free will.
James Tagg
Liberty is not an Idea belonging to Volition, or preferring; but to the Person having the Power of doing, or forbearing to do, according as the Mind shall chuse or direct.
John Locke
The whole struggle was over, and yet there seemed to have been no moment of victory. You might say, if you liked, that the power of choice had been simply set aside and an inflexible destiny substituted for it. On the other hand, you might say he had delivered from the rhetoric of his passions and had emerged in unassailable freedom. Ransom could not for the life of him, see any difference between these two statements. Predestination and freedom were apparently identical. He could no longer see any meaning in the many arguments he had heart on the subject.
C.S. Lewis
I can help you, Jorge. I can give you back your self. I can give you your will.' He held out his hand, palm open. 'Free will has to be taken,' I said.
Mark Lawrence
Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it.
Neil Gaiman