Quotes by British Authors - Page 156

The NSA is looking for terrorists. They’re not getting psychosexual pleasure out of their schadenfreude about you.”—
Jon Ronson
I am not ashamed that I was once a vacuum-cleaner salesman, only that I was a *good* vacuum-cleaner salesman.
Robert Morley
Shame was one of those things that had to be excised like a cancer, but it was a hard thing to remove when it was wrapped around your heart.
Simon Wood
When shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes, nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.
Jon Ronson
[W]e all care deeply about things that seem totally inconsequential to other people. We all carry around with us the flotsam and jetsam of perceived humiliations that actually mean nothing. We are a mass of vulnerabilities, and who knows what will trigger them?
Jon Ronson
I lie there for a while in the dusk, then make a decision, little knowing how it will affect every facet of my life and fiber of my being for the rest of my life: I say no to shame.
Alan Cumming
When you make a man ashamed, you make him dangerous.
Chris Cleave
It seems to me that all the people involved in the Hank and Adria story thought they were doing something good. But they only revealed that our imagination is so limited, our arsenal of potential responses so narrow, that the only thing anyone can think to do with an inappropriate shamer like Adria is to punish her with a shaming. All of the shamers had themselves come from a place of shame, and it really felt parochial and self-defeating to instinctively slap shame onto shame like a clumsy builder covering cracks.
Jon Ronson
This man had something to hide, some shame in his past, and those with a past can always be bought.
Ian Rankin
It's shame that gets us killed. Shame is the anchor, the heaviest burden to carry from the battlefield. Fortunately shame was an affliction I'd never suffered from.
Mark Lawrence
Oh! that look of love!" continued he, between his teeth, as he bolted himself into his own private room. "And that cursed lie; which showed some terrible shame in the background, to be kept from the light in which I thought she lived perpetually! Oh, Margaret, Margaret! Mother, how you have tortured me! Oh! Margaret, could you not have loved me? I am but uncouth and hard, but I would never have led you into any falsehood for me.
Elizabeth Gaskell
On Saturday mornings Mr Ewing would make his rounds, giving each tradesman £1 and the apprentices, ten shillings. Needless to say, we were all peeping around corners awaiting his arrival!
Ian Thompson
Not, how much of my money will I give to God, but, how much of God’s money will I keep for myself?
John Wesley
Give with a free hand, but give only of your own.
J.R.R. Tolkien
To get he had tried,yet his store was still meager.To a wise man he cried,in a voice keen and eager;Pray tell me how I may successfully live?And the wise man replied,"To get you must give."As to giving he said,"What have I to give?"I've scarce enough bread,and of course one must live;But I would partake of Life's bountifulstore. Came the wise man's response;"Then you must give more."The lesson he learned;to get was forgotten,Toward mankind he turnedwith a love new begotten.As he gave of himself in useful living,Then joy crowned his days,for he grew rich in giving.
Arthur William Beer
It is beautiful, beautiful to give; one of the very most beautiful things in life.
Elizabeth von Arnim
One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.
George Eliot
[G]iving yourself some loving attention is not selfish. It is sensible. If you feel loved and cherished--even if it is only by yourself--then you will have more love to give to others, too. (83)
Penelope Quest
We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.
Winston S. Churchill
No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.
Charles Dickens
[The materialist] thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think [the materialist] a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies.
G.K. Chesterton
Dreams shouldn't be about what you can buy--they should be about what mark you leave in the world.
Claire Cross
Stuff comes and stuff goes and the only thing that matters in the end is who you are inside, what you do and what make it leaves in the world.
Claire Cross
One criticism of Freud still sometimes heard on the political Left is that his thinking is individualist — that he substitutes ‘private’ psychological causes and explanations for social and historical ones. This accusation reflects a radical misunderstanding of Freudian theory. There is indeed a real problem about how social and historical factors are related to the unconscious; but one point of Freud’s work is that it makes it possible for us to think of the development of the human individual in social and historical terms. What Freud produces, indeed, is nothing less than a materialist theory of the making of the human subject. We come to be what we are by an interrelation of bodies — by the complex transactions which take place during infancy between our bodies and those which surround us. This is not a biological reductionism: Freud does not of course believe that we are nothing but our bodies, or that our minds are mere reflexes of them. Nor is it an asocial model of life, since the bodies which surround us, and our relations with them, are always socially specific.
Terry Eagleton
William Carey chides his countrymen for deciding it would be impossible for the Gospel to travel over great distances and to penetrate varied cultures when they are willing to face the same trials for the sake of commerce.
William Carey
The less you need, the more you live
Benny Bellamacina
They might have you, and they pay badly enough to guarantee you decent company.
John le Carré
In post-Nietzschean spirit, the West appears to be busily undermining its own erstwhile metaphysical foundations with an unholy mélange of practical materialism, political pragmatism, moral and cultural relativism, and philosophical skepticism.
Terry Eagleton
The more things we accumulate, the more cluttered our lives become, and the more stressed we feel as we are compelled to think about them. Life is about people not about things.
Natalie Vellacott
Shopkeepers —the great landed and commercial interests—regularly sat and slept, and where the two publicans occupied pews, but seldom made even the pretence of worshipping.
Thomas Hughes
This work of making trade righteous, of Christianizing trade, looks like the very hardest the Gospel has ever had to take in hand—in England at any rate.
Thomas Hughes
Grey hoped the Church would yet be able to save England from the fate of Tyre or Carthage, the great trading nations
Thomas Hughes
Other major world religions are still centered in the same general geographic area from which they originated except for Christianity. Even more intriguing, the center of Christian growth continues to move. Why? This author suggests that Christian principles bring prosperity but then the prosperity brings a temptation to chase stability and respectability. Thus, Christian growth moves to an area where people are desperate enough to trust Christ alone.
Andrew Walls
Science and religion have in common the aim of seeking and achieving unity. Most scientists today are being led increasingly away from the fundamental aim of science to achieve unity into rather limited ways of thinking without much open-mindedness, doing things merely to meet limited material needs.
Maurice Wilkins
Get out of this office! I'll have no feelings here.
Charles Dickens
If we would remember that all the trees of earth are marked for the woodman's axe, we should not be so ready to build our nests in them.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
A daily portion is all that a man really wants. We do not need tomorrow's supplies; that day has not yet dawned, and its wants are as yet unborn. The thirst which we may suffer in the month of June does not need to be quenched in February, for we do not feel it yet; if we have enough for each day as the days arrive we shall never know want.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
The author says the earliest Australian aborigines devoted extraordinary amounts of energy to enterprises no one now can understand.
Bill Bryson
If you are dissatisfied with what you have,Then you will never be satisfied with what you have.
Anthony T.Hincks
But in spite of this material prosperity he was a slave. His work and his leisure consisted of feverish activity, punctuated by moments of listless idleness which he regarded as both sinful and unpleasant. Unless he was one of the furiously successful minority, he was apt to be haunted by moments of brooding, too formless to be called meditation, and of yearning, too blind to be called desire. For he and all his contemporaries were ruled by certain ideas which prevented them from living a fully human life.
Olaf Stapledon
Unhappy: People look around and think, why are there so many people that are unhappy? We have progressed so far, yet people are still unhappy. Why isn’t this world the wonderful place it could be? Changing the world doesn’t change us.It does not matter how much we progress materially; it will not change anything. Only learning and seeing the truth will change us, and thus change everything.The truth transforms a mortal man into an immortal spiritual being.It does this because the truth just shows you what you truly are, and that changes everything. The truth does the same thing for the way we see the world and for the same reason. It shows you life clearly; it shows you true life for the first time.
Michael Smith
It is in this sense that Nietzsche is driven, against many explicit resolutions to the contrary, to be a No-sayer. For what the décadents who surround him are doing is to say No where they should be saying Yes, where they should be Dionysian; and what is leading them to this life-denying perversity, mostly of course unconsciously, is that they subscribe to a set of values that puts the central features of *this* world at a discount. Where they find suffering, they immediately look for someone to blame, and end up hating themselves, or generalize that into a hatred of "human nature". They look for "peace of mind", using it as a blanket term and failing to see the diversity of states, some of them desirable and some of them the reverse, which that term covers. They confuse cause and effect, thinking that the connection between virtue and happiness is that the former leads to the latter, whereas in fact the reverse is the case. They have, in Nietzsche's cruelly accurate phrase, "the vulgar ambition to possess generous feelings" ("Expeditions of an Untimely Man, number 6). They confuse breeding fine men with taming them. Throughout the major part of Twilight this devastating list of our vulgarities continues.
Michael Tanner
In poor Rosamond’s mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in.
George Eliot
It had never occurred to him that he should live in any other than what he would have called an ordinary way, with green glasses for hock, and excellent waiting at table. In warming himself at French social theories he had brought away no smell of scorching. We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture, our dinner-giving, and preference for armorial bearings in our own ease, link us indissolubly with the established order.
George Eliot
The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings.
G.K. Chesterton
Bread is a second cause; the LORD Himself is the first source of our sustenance. He can work without the second cause as well as with it; and we must not tie Him down to one mode of operation. Let us not be too eager after the visible, but let us look to the invisible God.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Like many another materialist, that is, he lied cleverly on the basis of insufficient knowledge, because the knowledge supplied seemed to his own particular intelligence inadmissible.("The Wendigo")
Algernon Blackwood
A very narrow income has a tendency to contract the mind, and sour the temper. Those who can barely live, and who live perforce in a very small, and generally very inferior, society, may well be illiberal and cross.
Jane Austen
Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.
John Ruskin
Are the things you are living for worth Christ dying for?
Leonard Ravenhill
Conditioning was something I always shied away from, now I've learnt that training never stops.
Mark Donnelly
You are never to old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
C.S. Lewis
Never give up.' This is not sound advice, it is bad advice. You must give up when there is no point in continuing. Then begin a new course. There is no greater failure than not changing course when the time is right to do so.
Chloe Thurlow
seven times down eight times up like the Daruma doll
Chris Bradford
Create Your Own Miracles, don't wait for Miracles to happen.
Steven Redhead
Ought we not to look upon our own history as being at least as full of God, as full of His goodness and of His truth, as much a proof of His faithfulness and veracity, as the lives of any of the saints who have gone before? We do our Lord an injustice when we suppose that He wrought all His mighty acts, and showed Himself strong for those in the early time, but doth not perform wonders or lay bare His arm for the saints who are now upon the earth.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
If the Almighty chose to establish his religion by miracles, he chooses to carry it on by means.
Hannah More
For a Man cannot believe a Miracle without relying upon Sense, nor Transubstantiation without renouncing it. So that never were any two things so ill coupled together as the Doctrine of Christianity and that of Transubstantiation, because they draw several ways, and are ready to strangle one another: For the main Evidence of the Christian Doctrine, which is Miracles, is resolved into the certainty of Sense, but this Evidence is clear and point blank against Transubstantiation.
John Tillotson
...some of the miracles do locally what God has already done universally: others do locally what He has not yet done, but will do.
C.S. Lewis
Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water!
Terry Pratchett