Quotes by British Authors - Page 20

Ability is sexless.
Christabel Pankhurst
It is a purely relative matter where one draws the plimsoll-line of condemnation and ... if you find the whole of humanity falls below it you have simply made a mistake and drawn it too high. And you are probably below it yourself.
Frances Partridge
We do not make beams from the hollow decaying trunk of the fallen oak. We use the upsoaring tree in the full vigor of its sap.
Sylvia Pankhurst
One may understand the cosmos but never the ego the self is more distant than any star.
G.K. Chesterton
You can live a lifetime and at the end of it know more about other people than you know about yourself.
Beryl Markham
The happy man is he who knows his limitations yet bows to no false gods.
Robert W. Service
No man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.
Joseph Conrad
We are the same people as we were at three six ten or twenty years old. More noticeably so perhaps at six or seven because we were not pretending so much then.
Agatha Christie
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
Virginia Woolf
Resolve to be thyself and know that he who finds himself loses his misery.
Matthew Arnold
The deeper interior you have the more you have in your library.
Jacqueline Bisset
People who concentrate on giving good service always get more personal satisfaction as well as better business. How can we get better service? One way is by trying to see ourselves as others do.
Patricia Fripp
Saying "yes" to yourself means acknowledging what you have that's good and working on the things that aren't.
Patricia Fripp
It's all to do with the training: you can do a lot if you're properly trained.
Queen Elizabeth II
The less said the better.
Jane Austen
The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
Ninety percent of the world's woe comes from people not knowing themselves their abilities their frailties and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves.
Sydney J. Harris
He that would be superior to external influences must first become superior to his own passions.
Samuel Johnson
Blessed is the man who having nothing to say abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
George Eliot
The silence of a man who loves to praise is a censure sufficiently severe.
Charlotte Lennox
Love understands love it needs no talk.
Frances Ridley Havergal
All the feeling which my father could not put into words was in his hand- any dog child or horse would recognize the kindness of it.
Freya Stark
Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.
Hannah Moore
It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree but smiles.
Muriel Spark
Handle them carefully for words have more power than atom bombs.
Pearl Strachan Hurd
The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection.
George Eliot
Ambition old as mankind the immemorial weakness of the strong.
Vita Sackville-West
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving and that's your own self.
Aldous Huxley
In a society where the rights and potential of women are constrained no man can be truly free. He may have power but he will not have freedom.
Mary F. Robinson
He that would govern others should first be the master of himself.
Philip Massinger
He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down and without walls.
Taylor Caldwell
You've got to ensure that the holders of an opinion however unpopular are allowed to put across their points of view.
Betty Boothroyd
Who is apt on occasion to assign a multitude of reasons when one will do? This is a sure sign of weakness in argument.
Harriet Martineau
To wear your heart on your sleeve isn't a very good plan you should wear it inside where it functions best.
Margaret Thatcher
Waiting is one of the great arts.
Margery Allingham
A little of what you fancy does you good.
Marie Lloyd
The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.
Ouida
Sweet words are like honey a little may refresh but too much gluts the stomach.
Anne Bradstreet
What we do upon some great occasion will probably depend on what we already are and what we are will be the result of previous years of self-discipline.
H. P. Liddon
Man who man would be must rule the empire of himself.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labour is immense.
Arnold Bennett
When the fight begins within himself a man's worth something.
Robert Browning
Nobody holds a good opinion of a man who has a low opinion of himself.
Anthony Trollope
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.
Stephen Spender
Might could would-they are contemptible auxiliaries.
George Eliot
Shyness is just egotism out of its depth.
Penelope Keith
One's self-image is very important because if that's in good shape then you can do anything or practically anything.
Sir John Gielgud
Our self-conceit sustains and always must sustain us.
Samuel Butler
Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.
Samuel Johnson
Doubt indulged soon becomes doubt realized.
Frances Ridley Havergal
Be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur.
Muriel Spark
I refuse to admit that I am more than fifty-two even if that does make my sons illegitimate.
Nancy Astor
I used to dread getting older because I thought I would not be able to do all the things I wanted to do but now that I am older I find that I don't want to do them.
Nancy Astor
A woman's always younger than a man of equal years.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
Character contributes to beauty. It fortifies a woman as her youth fades. A mode of conduct a standard of courage discipline fortitude and integrity can do a great deal to make a woman beautiful.
Jacqueline Bisset
It is often the case with finer natures that when the fire of the spirit dies out with increasing age the power of the intellect is unaltered or increased.
Margaret Gatty
Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting and fairly serene but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
We who are old know that age is more than a disability. It is an intense and varied experience almost beyond our capacity at times but something to be carried high.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
Self-respect will keep a man from being abject when he is in the power of enemies and will enable him to feel that he may be in the right when the world is against him.
Bertrand Russell
Only so far as a man believes strongly mightily can he act cheerfully or do anything worth doing.
Frederick W. Robertson