Quotes by British Authors - Page 24

Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.
Sydney J. Harris
I have always found that each step we take in life is to be regretted-if we once begin to wonder how many other steps might have been possible.
John Oliver Hobbes
If you have behaved badly repent make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
Aldous Huxley
The only causes of regret are laziness outbursts of temper hurting others prejudice jealousy and envy.
Germaine Greer
Your luck is how you treat people.
Bridget O'Donnell
Luck ... taps once in a lifetime at everybody's door but if industry does not open it luck goes away.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Chance works for us when we are good captains.
George Meredith
Good and bad luck is a synonym in the great majority of instances for good and bad judgment.
John Chatfield
The feast of reason and the flow of soul.
Alexander Pope
You must always be open to your luck. You cannot force it but you can recognize it.
Henry Moore
Talent on its own sat gracefully only on the very young. After a certain age it was what you did with it that counted.
Liza Cody
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
George Orwell
Reason is God's gift but so are the passions. Reason is as guilty as passion.
Cardinal Newman
Reason is an emotion for the sexless.
Heathcote Williams
A life based on reason will always require to be balanced by an occasional bout of violent and irrational emotion for the instinctual tribes must be satisfied.
Cyril Connolly
The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.
Cyril Connolly
Nothing which is at all times and in every way agreeable to us can have objective reality. It is of the very nature of the real that it should have sharp corners and rough edges that it should be resistant should be itself. Dream-furniture is the only kind on which you never stub your toes or bang your knee.
C.S. Lewis
Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality because reality is a spirit.
G.K. Chesterton
If anything is poisoning our lives and weakening our society it is reality - and not the fabrication of television writers and producers.
Martin Moloney
I have nothing to offer but blood toil tears and sweat.
Winston Churchill
Human kind cannot bear very much reality.
T.S Eliot
Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.
George Eliot
Moderation in war is imbecility.
Admiral John Fisher
When one's expectations are reduced to zero one really appreciates everything one does have.
Stephen Hawking
A fool or idiot is one who expects things to happen that never can happen.
George Eliot
There is an illusion that has much to do with ... most of our unhappiness. ... We expect too much.
Joseph Farrell
We do not write as we want but as we can.
W Somerset Maugham
Real life is to most men ... a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.
Bertrand Russell
If we are to survive on this planet there must be compromises.
Storm Jameson
People are lucky and unlucky ... according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.
Samuel Butler
The scornful nostril and the high head gather not the odors that lie on the track of truth.
George Eliot
Truth has rough flavors if we bite it through.
George Eliot
In science read by preference the newest works in literature the oldest. The classic literature is always modern.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for the treasures of India.
Edward Gibbon
I had always assumed that cliche was a suburb of Paris until I discovered it to be a street in Oxford.
Philip Guedalla
It's better to be quotable than to be honest.
Tom Stoppard
Geography is about maps But biography is about chaps.
E.C. Bentley
The butler entered the room a solemn procession of one.
P.G. Wodehouse
Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
Cyril Connolly
Oats n.s. A grain which in England is generally given to horses but in Scotland supports the people.
Samuel Johnson
Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.
G.K. Chesterton
The ugliest of trades have their moments of pleasure. Now if I was a grave digger or even a hangman there are some people I could work for with a great deal of enjoyment.
Douglas Jerrold
My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me.
Benjamin Disraeli
India is a geographical term. It is no more a United Nation than the Equator.
Winston Churchill
He has all of the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
Winston Churchill
In baiting a mousetrap with cheese always leave room for the mouse.
Saki
Sherard Blaw the dramatist who had discovered himself and who had given so unstintingly of his discovery to the world.
Saki
Worthless as wither'd weeds.
Emily Brontë
Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best.
Max Beerbohm
A diplomat these days is nothing but a head waiter who is allowed to sit down occasionally.
Peter Ustinov
Heat madam! It was so dreadful that I found there was nothing for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones.
Sydney Smith
Quality not quantity is my measure.
Douglas Jerrold
Questioning is not the mode of conversation among gentlemen.
Samuel Johnson
He that would pun would pick a pocket.
Alexander Pope
I never knew an enemy to puns who was not an ill-natured man.
Charles Lamb
I have always been a quarter of an hour before my time and it has made a man of me.
Lord Horatio Nelson
My object all sublime I shall achieve in time - To let the punishment fit the crime.
W.S. Gilbert
It is to the middle class we must look for the safety of England.
William Thackeray
Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution.
G.K. Chesterton
A psychiatrist is a man who goes to the Folies-Bergere and looks at the audience.
Mervyn Stockwood