Quotes by British Authors - Page 28

If you think that your partner has been cheating, then take a look at their will. If a past lover is in there, then it is probable that some form of infidelity has occurred.
Steven Magee
Sometimes people with low self-esteem will try to punish you for caring about them.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
The image that concerns most people is the reflection they see in other people's minds.
Edward de Bono
There are those who will resent you for not being confined by their limitations.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Taking charge of our life reinforces our self-worth.
Sam Owen
Kissinger projects a strong impression of a man at home in the world and on top of his brief. But there are a number of occasions when it suits him to pose as a sort of Candide: naive, and ill-prepared for and easily unhorsed by events. No doubt this pose costs him something in point of self-esteem. It is a pose, furthermore, which he often adopts at precisely the time when the record shows him to be knowledgeable, and when knowledge or foreknowledge would also confront him with charges of responsibility or complicity.
Christopher Hitchens
A place without meaning is no place to be.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the ‘imaginary’ level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it. There is a radical split between these two levels of being — a gap most dramatically exemplified by the act of referring to myself in a sentence. When I say ‘Tomorrow I will mow the lawn,’ the ‘I’ which I pronounce is an immediately intelligible, fairly stable point of reference which belies the murky depths of the ‘I’ which does the pronouncing. The former ‘I’ is known to linguistic theory as the ‘subject of the enunciation’, the topic designated by my sentence; the latter ‘I’, the one who speaks the sentence, is the ‘subject of the enunciating’, the subject of the actual act of speaking. In the process of speaking and writing, these two ‘I’s’ seem to achieve a rough sort of unity; but this unity is of an imaginary kind. The ‘subject of the enunciating’, the actual speaking, writing human person, can never represent himself or herself fully in what is said: there is no sign which will, so to speak, sum up my entire being. I can only designate myself in language by a convenient pronoun. The pronoun ‘I’ stands in for the ever-elusive subject, which will always slip through the nets of any particular piece of language; and this is equivalent to saying that I cannot ‘mean’ and ‘be’ simultaneously. To make this point, Lacan boldly rewrites Descartes’s ‘I think, therefore I am’ as: ‘I am not where I think, and I think where I am not.
Terry Eagleton
Certain American uses of deconstruction, Derrida has observed, work to ensure ‘an institutional closure’ which serves the dominant political and economic interests of American society. Derrida is clearly out to do more than develop new techniques of reading: deconstruction is for him an ultimately political practice, an attempt to dismantle the logic by which a particular system of thought, and behind that a whole system of political structures and social institutions, maintains its force. He is not seeking, absurdly, to deny the existence of relatively determinate truths, meanings, identities, intentions, historical continuities; he is seeking rather to see such things as the effects of a wider and deeper history of language, of the unconscious, of social institutions and practices.
Terry Eagleton
The Use of the Understanding, in endeavouring to find out the Meaning of any Proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature and Evidence for or against it, and in judging of it according to the seeming Force or Weakness of the Evidence.
Anthony Collins
You've a perfect right to call me as impractical as a dormouse, and to feel I'm out of touch with life. But this is the point where we simply can't see eye to eye. We've nothing whatever in common. Don't you see. . . it's not an accident that's drawn me from Blake to Whitehead, it's a certain line of thought which is fundamental to my whole approach. You see, there's something about them both. . . They trusted the universe. You say I don't know what the modern world's like, but that's obviously untrue. Anyone who's spent a week in London knows just what it's like. . . if you mean neurosis and boredom and the rest of it. And I do read a modern novel occasionally, in spite of what you say. I've read Joyce and Sartre and Beckett and the rest, and every atom in me rejects what they say. They strike me as liars and fools. I don't think they're dishonest so much as hopelessly tired and defeated."Lewis had lit his pipe. He did it as if Reade were speaking to someone else. Now he said, smiling faintly, "I don't think we're discussing modern literature."Reade had an impulse to call the debater's trick, but he repressed it. Instead he said quietly, "We're discussing modern life, and you brought up the subject. And I'm trying to explain why I don't think that murders and wars prove your point. I'm writing about Whitehead because his fundamental intuition of the universe is the same as my own. I believe like Whitehead that the universe is a single organism that somehow takes account of us. I don't believe that modern man is a stranded fragment of life in an empty universe. I've an instinct that tells me that there's a purpose, and that I can understand that purpose more deeply by trusting my instinct. I can't believe the world is meaningless. I don't expect life to explode in my face at any moment. When I walk back to my cottage, I don't feel like a meaningless fragment of life walking over a lot of dead hills. I feel a part of the landscape, as if it's somehow aware of me, and friendly.
Colin Wilson
The man I am writing about is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water.
W Somerset Maugham
Empiricism assumes that objects can be understood independendy of observing subjects. Truth is therefore assumed to lie in a world external to the observer whose job is to record and faithfully reflect the attributes of objects. This logical empiricism is a pragmatic version of that scientific method which goes under the name of 'logical positivism', and is founded in a particular and very strict view of language and meaning.
David Harvey
Was it possible to find recompense, meaning, connection with others amidst the mess and the muddle ?
Elizabeth Buchan
The majority of the common people do not realize that calling 911 may result in a stressed out armed police officer that has a range of medical issues and is taking potent prescription drugs being sent to out to them.
Steven Magee
Who is She? She is your power, your Feminine source. Big Mama. The Goddess. The Great Mystery. The web-weaver. The life force. The first time, the twentieth time you may not recognize her. Or pretend not to hear. As she fills your body with ripples of terror and delight.But when she calls you will know you’ve been called. Then it is up to you to decide if you will answer.
Lucy H. Pearce
A truly free man is not free 'from' anything, nor free 'to' anything, he is just free. Free within himself.
Ilyas Kassam
I'd just killed some of the best riders in the world - and I was clean. I'd taken nothing - no EPO, no cortisone, no testosterone, no painkillers, no caffeine. I had justified to myself that I was a great rider without drugs - yet perversely given myself the green light to dope again. I'd proved what I could do clean - how much more could I do if I was doped?
David Millar
We seem to be unable to resist overstating every aspect of ourselves: how long we are on the planet for, how much it matters what we achieve, how rare and unfair are our professional failures, how rife with misunderstandings are our relationships, how deep are our sorrows. Melodrama is individually always the order of the day.
Alain de Botton
Our abilities and possibilities are at one and the same time very limited and quite infinite dependent on the depth of our relationship to our 'self', others and life itself.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Time alone helps us to remember who we are.
Fennel Hudson
When you realise you are just as ridiculous & just as #special as everyone else, you love them all.
Jay Woodman
The leading research in the adverse human health effects of electromagnetic radiation is not being done by well funded governments or corporations, it is coming from a few self funded independent researchers.
Steven Magee
Stop looking outside or at others for that which you seek of yourself.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Meanwhile, the self can stand in the way of the Not-Self, interfering with the free flow of spiritual grace, this maintaining the self in a state of blindness, and also with the flow of animal grace, which leads to the impairment of natural functions and, in the long run, of the slower processes called structure. For each individual human being, the main practical problems are these: How can I prevent my ego from eclipsing the inner light, synteresis, scintilla animae, and so perpetuating the state of unregenerate illusion and blindness? And these practical problems remain unchallenged, even if we abandon the notion of an entelechy or physiological intelligencer, of an atman or pneuma and think, instead, in terms [of] systems...
Aldous Huxley
Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences.
Bertrand Russell
While you'll feel compelled to charge forward it's often a gentle step back that will reveal to you where you and what you truly seek.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
All that is gold does not glitter,Not all those who wander are lost.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Kindness is a calling. Caring about people is powerful. Love changes lives.
Rachel Hamilton
A Princess has beautiful manners no matter who she’s dealing with. She would never stoop to being brusque when giving a burger order, or shouting at the barista who forgot her syrup shot. When we behave like true Princesses, people enjoy serving us, because they’re more likely to get a sympathetic smile instead of a complaint about the long wait.
Rosie Blythe
You may possibly become rich by just caring about yourself and what you want to gain from your profession and your life but you cannot possibly enrich the lives of everyone you meet that way.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
But above all, above respect and esteem, there was a motive within her of good will which could not be overlooked. It was gratitude. -- Gratitude, not merely for having once loved her, but for loving her still well enough, to forgive all the petulance and acrimony of her manner in rejecting him, and all the unjust accusations accompanying her rejection. He who, she had been persuaded, would avoid her as his greatest enemy, seemed, on this accidental meeting, most eager to preserve the acquaintance, and without any indelicate display of regard, or any peculiarity of manner, where their two selves only were concerned, was soliciting the good opinion of her friends, and bent on making her known to his sister.
Jane Austen
Tomorrow's leaders will not lead dictating from the front, nor pushing from the back. They will lead from the centre - from the heart
Rasheed Ogunlaru
There are ultimately two choices in life: to fight it or to embrace it. If you fight it you will lose - if you embrace it you become one with it and you'll be lived.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
We're merely one tree with various types, shapes and sizes of leaves that all wave differently in the breeze
Rasheed Ogunlaru
True kindness ennobles the giver
Jocelyn Murray
All pursuits are pointless and fruitless unless and until love and compassion are found and then are the foundation and destination of all you do
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Some strive to make themselves great. Others help others see and find their own greatness. It's the latter who really enrich the world we live in
Rasheed Ogunlaru
We'd incorporated Asia into our bones - its colours and laughter, its smells, its rhythms, its tolerance and patience, its compassion, its lack of ageism.
Jane Wilson-Howarth
You may possibly become rich by just caring about yourself and what you want to gain from life but you cannot possibly enrich the lives of everyone you meet that way. The pathway to enlightenment and transformation and liberation is the heart not the mind.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Jesus loved manhood so much, that He delighted to honour it; and since it is a high honour, and indeed, the greatest dignity of manhood, that Jesus is the Son of man,
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Try to show grace, mercy and compassion, for one day you may need them.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Only love and compassion can bring true and lasting transformation
Rasheed Ogunlaru
See this abdicated beast, once kingOf them all, nibble his claws:Not anger enough left—no, nor despair—To break his teeth on the bars.
Cecil Day-Lewis
Should I, too, prefer the title of 'non-Jewish Jew'? For some time, I would have identified myself strongly with the attitude expressed by Rosa Luxemburg, writing from prison in 1917 to her anguished friend Mathilde Wurm:An inordinate proportion of the Marxists I have known would probably have formulated their own views in much the same way. It was almost a point of honor not to engage in 'thinking with the blood,' to borrow a notable phrase from D.H. Lawrence, and to immerse Jewishness in other and wider struggles. Indeed, the old canard about 'rootless cosmopolitanism' finds a perverse sort of endorsement in Jewish internationalism: the more emphatically somebody stresses that sort of rhetoric about the suffering of others, the more likely I would be to assume that the speaker was a Jew. Does this mean that I think there are Jewish 'characteristics'? Yes, I think it must mean that.
Christopher Hitchens
If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void. (95)
Karen Armstrong
On the one hand maybe I’ve remained infantile, while on the other I matured quickly, because at a young age I was very aware of suffering and fear.
Audrey Hepburn
The radical hermeneutic of suspicion that characterizes all of post-modernity is essentially nihilistic, denying the very possibility of creative or healing love. In the cross and resurrection of Jesus we find the answer: the God who made the world is revealed in terms of a self-giving love that no hermeneutic of suspicion can ever touch, in a Self that found itself by giving itself away, in a Story that was never manipulative but always healing and recreating, and in a Reality that can truly be known, indeed to know which is to discover a new dimension of knowledge, the dimension of loving and being loved.
N.T. Wright
The Lord's mercy often rides to the door of our hearts on the black horse of affliction. Jesus uses the whole range of our experiences to wean us from earth and woo us to Heaven.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
When Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society, He chose for its cornerstone neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob, a coward – in a word, a man. And upon this rock He has built His Church, and the gates of Hell have not prevailed against it. All the empires and the kingdoms have failed, because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian Church, was founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link.
G.K. Chesterton
Christ's death is the Christian's life. Christ's cross is the Christian's title to heaven. Christ "lifted up" and put to shame on Calvary is the ladder by which Christians "enter into the holiest," and are at length landed in glory.
J.C. Ryle
You can't stand for Jesus without a Christ-like spirit.
John Yates
The sentiments attributed to Christ are in the Old Testament. They were familiar in the Jewish schools and to all the Pharisees, long before the time of Christ, as they were familiar in all the civilizations of the earth — Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian, Greek, and Hindu.
Joseph McCabe
In particular, we must take account of the well-known and striking saying of Jesus to the dying brigand beside him, recorded by Luke (23.43). 'Today,' he said, 'you will be with me in paradise.' 'Paradise' is not the final destination; it is a beautiful resting place on the way there. But notice. If there is anyone in the New Testament to whom we might have expected the classic doctrine of purgatory to apply, it would be this brigand. He had no time for amendment of life; no doubt he had all kinds of sinful thoughts and desires in what was left of his body. All the standard arguments in favour of purgatory apply to him. And yet Jesus assures him of his place in paradise, not in a few days or weeks, not if his friends say a lot of prayers and masses for him, but 'today.
N.T. Wright
They here shall be redeemed from sin,Shall here put on their glorious dress,Fine linen, pure, and white, and cleanThe saints' inherent righteousness.Love, perfect love, expels all doubt,Love makes them to the end endure;Their names thou never wilt blot out;Their life is hid, their heart is pure.Their names thou wilt vouchsafe to ownBefore thy Father's majesty,Pronounce them good, and say, 'Well done,Enter, and ever reign with me!
Charles Wesley
Do you have a girlfriend?''No,' I said quickly.Deny Honour again. Peter only denied Jesus three times. I must have denied Honour like three thousand times.
Ruth Ahmed
If God annihilates or creates or deflects a unit of matter, He has created a new situation at that point. Immediately all nature domiciles this new situation, makes it at home in her realm, adapts all other events to it. It finds itself conforming to all the laws. If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born.
C.S. Lewis
You dreamed like all mothers do.Until he began to speak aloud,Your boy,calling for justice in the market place,Demanding integrity and fair playin the courts and halls of business.Declaring the Realm of GodImminent,Manifest . . .Jesus leapt into the swelling crowdslike an axe into wood,Uncompromising and unrelentingin his passionate callfor peace and justice.Jesus, your boy,causing havoc in public,critiquing and condemningthe status quo,breaking rule after rule . . .And with every speech, with every act of defiance, with every call to liberation, with every amazing deed,Your dreams of peace and liberation,Your dreams of a secure old age,Your dreams of grandchildren—Evaporated.
Edwina Gateley
After that, he tried to go upstairs through the broom cupboard, and then the yard. This seemed to puzzle him a little. But finally he discovered the stairs, all except the bottom on, and fell up them on his face. The whole castle shook.
Diana Wynne Jones
Adam glanced at me. His grin was back. I’d forgotten how easily he could wind me up.“You know, Eliza,” he said, “maybe you’re missing something here.”“You’re going to be missing a few teeth if you don’t explain yourself,” I growled.
Sam Dogra