Quotes by British Authors - Page 29

No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
T.S Eliot
The poet's mind is ... a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings phrases images which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.
T.S Eliot
Poetry is a mug's game.
T.S Eliot
A drainless shower of light is poesy 'tis the supreme of power 'tis might half slumb'ring on its own right arm.
John Keats
The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet's but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's.
G.K. Chesterton
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved the Inquisition might have let him alone.
Thomas Hardy
Poets and painters are outside the class system or rather they constitute a special class of their own like the circus people and the gypsies.
Gerald Brenan
I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.
Robert Graves
There's no money in poetry but then there's no poetry in money either.
Robert Graves
When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.
T.S Eliot
The reader who is illuminated is in a real sense the poem.
H. M. Tomlinson
No man was ever yet a great poet without at the same time being a profound philosopher.
Hartley Coleridge
I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Villon our sad bad glad mad brother's name.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.
George Eliot
Fly the pleasure that bites tomorrow.
George Edward Herbert
The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
Walter Bagehot
In philosophy it is not the attainment of the goal that matters it is the things that are met with by the way.
Havelock Ellis
Philosophy goes no further than probabilities and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve.
James Froude
To teach how to live with uncertainty and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy in our age can still do for those who study it.
Bertrand Russell
Three passions simple but overwhelmingly strong have governed my life: the longing for love the search for knowledge and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
Bertrand Russell
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings Conquer all mysteries by rule and line Empty the haunted air the gnomed mine -Unweave a rainbow.
John Keats
A man of business may talk of philosophy a man who has none may practise it.
Alexander Pope
In North America there is the general belief that everything can be fixed that life can be fixed up. In Europe the view is that a lot can't be fixed up and that living properly is not necessarily a question of mastering the technology so much as learning to live gracefully within the constraints that the species invents.
Jonathan Miller
All philosophies if you ride them home are nonsense but some are greater nonsense than others.
Samuel Butler
Philosophy - the purple bullfinch in the lilac tree.
T.S Eliot
Science is what you know philosophy is what you don't know.
Bertrand Russell
Steal the hog and give the feet for alms.
George Edward Herbert
Let me be dressed fine as I will Flies worms and flowers exceed me still.
Isaac Watts
A blind man in a dark room - looking for a black hat which isn't there.
Lord Bowen
It takes a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
Alfred North Whitehead
In other words apart from the known and the unknown what else is there?
Harold Pinter
He had but one eye and the pocket of prejudice runs in favour of two.
Charles Dickens
Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he's well dressed. There ain't much credit in that.
Charles Dickens
Why don't you get a haircut you look like a chrysanthemum.
P.G. Wodehouse
But Shelley had a hyperthyroid face.
John C. Squire
One's eyes are what one is one's mouth what one becomes.
John Galsworthy
The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Hair is another name for sex.
Vidal Sassoon
Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald with a baldness full of grandeur.
Matthew Arnold
By perseverance the snails reached the ark.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
I am extraordinarily patient provided I get my own way in the end.
Margaret Thatcher
With ordinary talent and extraordinary perseverance all things are attainable.
Sir Thomas Foxwell Buxton
Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance.
Samuel Johnson
Excellence encourages one about life generally it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.
George Eliot
Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see. Thinks what ne'er was nor is nor e'er shall be.
Alexander Pope
A concern with the perfectibility of mankind is always a symptom of thwarted or perverted development.
Hugh Kingsmill
Sainthood is acceptable only in saints.
Pamela Hansford Johnson
The maxim "Nothing avails but perfection" may be spelled "Paralysis."
Winston Churchill
What after all is a halo? It's only one more thing to keep clean.
Christopher Fry
At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.
John Berger
A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault.
John Henry Cardinal Newman
Striving for perfection is the greatest stopper there is. You'll be afraid you can't achieve it. ... It's your excuse to yourself for not doing anything. Instead strive for excellence doing your best.
Sir Laurence Olivier
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
George Orwell
So much perfection argues rottenness somewhere.
Beatrice Potter Webb
A perfect poem is impossible. Once it has been written the world would end.
Robert Graves
The pen is mightier than the sword.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
The war-drum throbb'd no longer and the battleflags were furl'd In the parliament of man the federation of the world.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
If peace cannot be maintained with honor it is no longer peace.
Lord Russell
When somebody is angry with us we draw a halo around his or her head in our minds. Does the person stop being angry then? Well we don't know! We know though that when we draw a halo around a person suddenly the person starts to look like an angel to us.
John Lennon