Quotes by British Authors - Page 28

It seems to me probably that any one who has a series of intolerable positions to put up with must have been responsible for them to some extent... they have contributed to it by impatience or intolerance or brusqueness-or some provocation.
Robert Hugh Benson
The optimism of a healthy mind is indefatigable.
Margery Allingham
Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.
George Meredith
An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.
George Eliot
Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.
George Eliot
We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion just as affectively as by bombs.
Kenneth Clark
The pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity the optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
L. P. Jacks
Happiness is not a matter of events it depends upon the tides of the mind.
Alice Meynell
I like living. I have sometimes been wildly despairingly acutely miserable racked with sorrow but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
Agatha Christie
The world is like a mirror frown at it and it frowns at you. Smile and it smiles too.
Herbert Samuel
All seems infected that the infected spy as all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.
Alexander Pope
What we see depends mainly on what we look for.
John Lubbock
The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it and it will in turn look sourly upon you laugh at it and with it and it is a jolly kind companion.
William Makepeace Thackeray
A woman's hopes are woven of sunbeams a shadow annihilates them.
George Eliot
To think of losing is to lose already.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat.
Victoria
A good heart will help you to a bonny face my lad ... and a bad one will turn the bonniest into something worse than ugly.
Emily Brontë
It is only in sorrow bad weather masters us in joy we face the storm and defy it.
Amelia Barr
The pure the beautiful the bright That stirred our hearts in youth The impulse to a wordless prayer The dreams of love and truth The longings after something lost The spirit's yearning cry The strivings after better hopes These things can never die.
Sarah Doudney
I actually remember feeling delight at two o'clock in the morning when the baby woke for his feed because I so longed to have another look at him.
Margaret Drabble
Popular applause veers with the wind.
John Bright
A majority is always better than the best repartee.
Benjamin Disraeli
I always voted at my party's call And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
W.S. Gilbert
Who is the dark horse he has in his stable?
William Thackeray
I have the perfect simplified tax form for government. Why don't they just print our money with a return address on it?
Bob Hope
Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.
Margaret Thatcher
Harold Wilson is going around the country stirring up apathy.
William Whitelaw
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of polities'. All issues are political issues.
George Orwell
As I learnt very early in my life in Whitehall the acid test of any political question is: What is the alternative?
Lord Trent
Politics is more dangerous than war for in war you are only killed once.
Winston Churchill
There are two problems in my life. The political ones are insoluble and the economic ones are incomprehensible.
Alexander Douglas-Home
I have never regarded politics as the arena of morals. It is the arena of interests.
Aneurin Bevan
If people have to choose between freedom and sandwiches they will take sandwiches.
Lord Boyd-Orr
The lady's not for turning.
Margaret Thatcher
Damn your principles! Stick to your party!
Benjamin Disraeli
Politics is a field where action is one long second best and where the choice constantly lies between two blunders.
John Morley
There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
Lord Acton
I have never found in a long experience of politics that criticism is ever inhibited by ignorance.
Harold Macmillan
In politics a week is a very long time.
Harold Wilson
Party-spirit . . . which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.
Alexander Pope
What matters in Politics is what men actually do - sincerity is no excuse for acting unpolitically and insincerity may be channelled by politics into good results.
Bernard Crick
Politics is not a good location or a vocation for anyone lazy thin-skinned or lacking a sense of humour.
John Bailey
It was a storm in a tea cup but in politics we sail in paper boats.
Harold Macmillan
The Labour Party is going about the country stirring up apathy.
William White law
The great nations have always acted like gangsters and the small nations like prostitutes.
Stanley Kubrick
Politics is a blood sport.
Aneurin Bevan
A Conservative is a man who will not look at the new moon out of respect for that ancient institution the old one.
Douglas Jerrold
Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country.
Margaret Thatcher
A politician is a person with whose politics you don't agree if you agree with him he is a statesman.
David Lloyd George
All political lives unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture end in failure.
Enoch Powell
Greater love hath no man than this that he lay down his friends for his political life.
Jeremy Thorpe
It doesn't matter what you do in the bedroom as long as you don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.
Mrs. Patrick Campbell
Politeness is good nature regulated by good sense.
Sydney Smith
Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm and behave as outrageously as the world will let them.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Modesty: the gentle art of enhancing your charm by pretending not to be aware of it.
Oliver Herford
There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays and every single one of them is right.
Rudyard Kipling
Never speak of a man in his own presence. It is always indelicate and may be offensive .
Samuel Johnson
Reason respects the differences and imagination the similitudes of things.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those that do.
Cyril Connolly
When a great poet has lived certain things have been done once for all and cannot be achieved again.
T.S Eliot