Quotes by British Authors - Page 31

There are two schools of thought about the resilience of time. The first is that time is highly volatile, with every small event altering the possible outcome of the earth's future. The other view is that time is rigid, and no matter how hard you try, it will always spring back toward a determined present. Myself, I do not worry about such trivialities. I simply sell ties to anyone who wants to buy one...
Jasper Fforde
Soothsayers are like that. They see many futures but never their own.
Jasper Fforde
A time will come when men will stretch out their eyes. They should see planets like our Earth.
Christopher Wren
Each age selects its own geniuses from the past to suit its own needs. It's always been that way.
Seb Kirby
The most obvious and the most distinctive features of the History of Civilisation, during the last fifty years, is the wonderful increase of industrial production by the application of machinery, the improvement of old technical processes and the invention of new ones, accompanied by an even more remarkable development of old and new means of locomotion and intercommunication. By this rapid and vast multiplication of the commodities and conveniences of existence, the general standard of comfort has been raised, the ravages of pestilence and famine have been checked, and the natural obstacles, which time and space offer to mutual intercourse, have been reduced in a manner, and to an extent, unknown to former ages. The diminution or removal of local ignorance and prejudice, the creation of common interests among the most widely separated peoples, and the strengthening of the forces of the organisation of the commonwealth against those of political or social anarchy, thus effected, have exerted an influence on the present and future fortunes of mankind the full significance of which may be divined, but cannot, as yet, be estimated at its full value.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Learn from the past, log the lessons from the past, butleave the past!
Elizabeth George
All life is preoccupied with death. Death is the only certain future. Yet in the face of reason, everyone holds out hope for the highly improbable.
Johnny Rich
The science done by the young Einstein will continue as long as our civilization, but for civilization to survive, we'll need the wisdom of the old Einstein -- humane, global and farseeing. And whatever happens in this uniquely crucial century will resonate into the remote future and perhaps far beyond the Earth, far beyond the Earth
Martin J. Rees
MotherHushed and sacred silencefills the dawning skyI ponder in this momentof our journey which is nigh...
Muse
I grew up in an era that was a golden age of the blockbuster, when something we might call a family film could have universal appeal. That's something I want to see again. In terms of the tone of the film, it looks at where we are as a people and has a universality about human experience.
Christopher J. Nolan
To be honest, I’ve always made films and I never really stopped, starting with little stop-motion experiments using my dad’s Super 8 camera. In my mind, it’s all one big continuum of filmmaking and I’ve never changed.
Christopher J. Nolan
Dolorita Hunsickle says that the chipmunks tell your fortune if you catch them but I never did. She says a chipmunk told her she would grow up to be a famous ballerina and that she would die of consumption unloved in a boardinghouse in Prague.
Neil Gaiman
Don't you be thinking,' she says, 'on things that are done and can't be changed. All right, dear girl? You think of the time to come.
Sarah Waters
The future of the next generation relies on astronomers obtaining a full understanding ofthe rapidly changing human environmental conditions and the halting of biologically toxic corporategovernment policies. The overloading of the electromagnetic environment is one of these disastrouspolicies that must stop.
Steven Magee
In the future, it may turn out that fossil fuels are the blood of the Earth and by extracting them may lead to serious consequences to the Earth's survival, and by association, that of the humans.
Steven Magee
In 1949, neurologist Egas Moniz (1874-1955) received a Nobel Prize for his discovery of ‘the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses’. Today, prefrontal leucotomy is derided as a barbaric treatment from a much darker age, and it is to be hoped that, one day, so too might antipsychotic drugs.
Neel Burton
There is so much to say about a past. It's a vein of gold through a mountain, leading to an incontrovertible stone heart of truth. But the future is a horizon - a faintly visible line that will promise much, and always remain to far away to touch.
Aliya Whiteley
You ask a lot of little kids today what they want to be when they grow up and they say "I want to be famous." You ask them for what reason and they don't know or care. I think Andy Warhol got it wrong: in the future so many people are going to become famous that one day everybody will end up being anonymous for fifteen minutes.
Banksy
Unfortunately, the board of directors that the middle managers report to generally make them aggressive. Imagine being hired into a company and then being told that you have to ignore the emerging health and safety issues (This is illegal!) and not inform the workers that the system is known to be dangerous (This is illegal!). You have two options: To go to jail for illegal activities sometime in the future, or to lose your job now and have all your USA workplace rights removed for recognizing the illegal activities that your Directors want you to engage in. Welcome to the corporate America management team!
Steven Magee
He could not afford to indulge misery, to live in the past and stumble through life facing backwards.
Jonathan Renshaw
In this delicate and unpredictable life, the future is unwritten. Do not take someone for granted today, for once tomorrow dawns upon the indigo night the only remaining trace will be tracks in the sand...
Virginia Alison
If you are unaware of what's within, you will be shown in the mirror of your near future life experience. Wiser to keep a step ahead.
Jay Woodman
What happened when there was no prospect of anything beyond this generation? What happened when...
Anne Corlett
Numbers and more numbers...the future of mankind has come down to decimals. I guess you will figure that out, eventually.
Anthony T.Hincks
In the past the need for a hierarchal form of society has been the doctrine specifically of the High. It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and the priests, lawyers and the like who were parasitical upon them, and it had generally been softened by promises of an imaginary world beyond the grave.
George Orwell
I'm 65 years old. Everyday the future looks a little bit darker. But the past, even the grimy parts of it, well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time.
Alan Moore
Public Utility Commission (PUC), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) complaints are rarely upheld. It is estimated that less than 5% of complaints are successful and that the actual number may be below 1% in some cases.
Steven Magee
There was a monster in me that had to be fed by success. There is a monster in us all that has to be fed by something.
Chloe Thurlow
Welcome to Hollywood. Here you can be whatever you want! That's the secret of American success! Fake it till you make it!
Lily Amis
It is the artist who tries to gradually accustom people to the possibilities of a better state of things.
Catherine Amy Dawson Scott
Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.
Jeanette Winterson
Unless social sciences can be as creative as natural science, our new tools are not likely to be of much use to us.
Edgar Douglas Adrian
The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what's going on. Nowhere is it written that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called "true enough." I think that's a great idea. True enough is as true as can be gotten. The imagination is chaos. New forms are fetched out of it. The creative act is to let down the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and then to attempt to bring out of it ideas.
Rupert Sheldrake
The psychology of individual creativity is about at least three different things. First, creativity is about thinking differently. Second, creativity is about feeling differently. Third, creativity is about focusing, or committing, differently.
Max McKeown
I admit to being prone to deep thinking, which – given that I’m emerging from dark times – can take me to some very sombre or profound places. But this is no bad thing. I always resurface wiser and with a way of viewing things that is different to before.
Fennel Hudson
Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another.
Virginia Woolf
Nine-tenths of all artistic creation derives its basic energy from the engine of repression and sublimation, and well beyond the strict Freudian definition of those terms.John Fowles attended new College in Oxford. You might like to see my collection of Oxford trees at Rob's Bookshop.
John Fowles
[Beware of] the fallacy of misplaced concreteness [mistaking an abstraction for concrete reality, for actuality] In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence.Error is the price we pay for progress.In the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it."It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.[From various of Whitehead's books, not only PR]
Alfred North Whitehead
Over-mastered by some thoughts, I yeelded an inckie tribute unto them.
Philip Sidney
This is the crux of being a Creative Mother. It is more than how many jumpers you have knitted, or having an exhibition in a fancy gallery, or a bookshelf of your own books. It is about the act of living authentically whilst honoring your mother self and creative self. About saying yes to life, every part of your life, and finding how to weave them all together.
Lucy H. Pearce
The misfortune of a young man who returns to his native land after years away is that he finds his native land foreign; whereas the lands he left behind remain for ever like a mirage in his mind.However, misfortune can itself sow seeds of creativity.---- Afterword to "Hothouse" Brian Aldiss
Brian W. Aldiss
You have the right to chose your destiny, otherwise you will be left to live someone else's idea of what your life should be.
Steven Redhead
Nothing in life is a foregone conclusion unless and until it is foregone and concluded
Rasheed Ogunlaru
I saw only the reality of his destiny, which he had knownhow to follow with unfaltering footsteps, that life begun in humblesurroundings, rich in generous enthusiasms, in friendship, love, war--inall the exalted elements of romance.
Joseph Conrad
Emotion,' she told him, 'is not a reliable guide for our words and actions.''There you are wrong,' he said. 'Deep, true emotion is our surest guide. We make our greatest mistake when we allow our heads to rules ours hearts.''Emotion is our human weakness.,' she said, 'reason our strength.''And love,' he said, 'is our destiny.
Mary Balogh
Who am I? The shell-selling Lace girl, the attendant of Lady Arilou, Mother Govrie’s other daughter, the thing of dust, the victim, the revenger, the diplomat, the crowd-witch, the killer, the rescuer, the pirate?I am anything I wish to be. The world cannot choose for me. No, it is for me to choose what the world shall be.
Frances Hardinge
ego promenades, flounces, pushes in unwanted places, trips, stands on others, whereas a sense of destiny grounds - you just do what you do
Jay Woodman
Enlightenment is not about cocooning one’s self, but about integrating more fully with both your self and life.
Jay Woodman
In the long run most short cuts are flawed - especially on journeys to 'so-called' success
Rasheed Ogunlaru
the only source whence any thing like consolation or composure could be drawn, was in the resolution of her own better conduct, and the hope that, however inferior in spirit and gaiety might be the following and every future winter of her life to the past, it would yet find her more rational, more acquainted with herself, and leave her less to regret when it were gone.
Jane Austen
It seems to me that we do live in two worlds... there is this physical one, which is coherant, and there is the spiritual one, which to the average man with his flashes of religious experience, is very often incoherant. This experience of having two worlds to live in all the time, or not all the time, is a vital one, and is what living is like.
William Golding
Wherever sufficiently numerous series of the remains of any given group, which has endured for a long space of time, are carefully examined, their morphological relations are never in discordance with the requirements of the doctrine of evolution, and often afford convincing evidence of it. At the same time, it has been shown that certain forms persist with very little change, from the oldest to the newest fossiliferous formations; and thus show that progressive development is a contingent, and not a necessary result, of the nature of living matter.
Thomas Henry Huxley
He wore his medals. He had a surprising number of them, the real kind, not the ones you got for turning up. Although turning up was no mean thing, some days.
Nick Harkaway
I really should talk to him. He's had a near-death experience!”"We all have. It's called living."(Hogfather)
Terry Pratchett
You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it.
Neil Gaiman
Environmental radiation research is the rent I pay for living on this planet.
Steven Magee
The brain is both an emitter and a receiver of many forms of electromagnetic energy. There are fields of various forms around all living things, some we know about and others have yet to be documented.
Steven Magee
Every aspect of your life is anchored energetically in your living space, so clearing clutter can completely transform your entire existence.
Karen Kingston
If you are living in the electrified wireless west, then you are living a very abnormal lifestyle that your genetics has no adaptation to.
Steven Magee
The global population of Earth are involved in the following corporate government experiments: The long term effects of - 1. Nuclear bomb fallout radiation. 2. Man-made wireless radio frequency (RF) radiation. 3. Exposure to man-made electricity. 4. Eclipsing of the Sun by the International Space Station (ISS), satellites, airplanes and jet aircraft contrails (chemtrails). 5. Eating food forced grown using a variety of toxic industrial chemicals. 6. Adding massive amounts of pollution to the atmosphere and water bodies. 7. Living in metal structures. 8. Exposure to abnormally high solar radiation levels. 9. Relocating to areas that the human has no genetic adaptation to. 10. An indoor lifestyle.
Steven Magee