Quotes by British Authors - Page 35

There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don't knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don't.
Neil Gaiman
Away with them, away; we should not believe fairy stories if we wish to be good. Think of them as persons from the fairy wood.
Stevie Smith
We are here in a wood of little beeches: And the leaves are like black lace Against a sky of nacre. One bough of clear promise Across the moon. It is in this wise that God speaketh unto me. He layeth hands of healing upon my flesh, Stilling it in an eternal peace, Until my soul reaches out myriad and infinite hands Toward him, And is eased of its hunger. And I know that this passes: This implacable fury and torment of men, As a thing insensate and vain: And the stillness hath said unto me, Over the tumult of sounds and shaken flame, Out of the terrible beauty of wrath, I alone am eternal. One bough of clear promise Across the moon
Frederic Manning
The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert, that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.Isaiah answer'd, I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then persuaded, & remain confirm'd; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote.
William Blake
[She wasn't] a logically reasoning woman, but God is good, and hearts may count in heaven as high as heads.
Charles Dickens
False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.
Charles Darwin
Chainschains that hold me to the groundchains that keep me solidly boundchains that tether my heart to youchains that only one truth...
Muse
How initially 'to get her in the sack' and subsequently to avoid 'her giving you the sack' are not identical dilemmas faced by the male species, but they sure have a bizarre habit of being bedfellows
Alex Morritt
Any actor who tells you that they have become the people they play, unless they’re clearly diagnosed as a schizophrenic, is bullshitting you.
Gary Oldman
I willingly accept Cassandra's fateTo speak the truth, although believed too late.
Anne Killigrew
So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.
Thomas Hardy
I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it.
Anne Brontë
In order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.
Samuel Johnson
Do you want this to be a love story?
Jenny Downham
For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth".
A.S. Byatt
Let's say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says maybe 100,000. Richard Dawkins thinks maybe a quarter-of-a-million. I'll take 100,000. In order to be a Christian, you have to believe that for 98,000 years, our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25 years, dying of their teeth. Famine, struggle, bitterness, war, suffering, misery, all of that for 98,000 years.Heaven watches this with complete indifference. And then 2000 years ago, thinks 'That's enough of that. It's time to intervene,' and the best way to do this would be by condemning someone to a human sacrifice somewhere in the less literate parts of the Middle East. Don't lets appeal to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilization. Let's go to the desert and have another revelation there. This is nonsense. It can't be believed by a thinking person.Why am I glad this is the case? To get to the point of the wrongness of Christianity, because I think the teachings of Christianity are immoral. The central one is the most immoral of all, and that is the one of vicarious redemption. You can throw your sins onto somebody else, vulgarly known as scapegoating. In fact, originating as scapegoating in the same area, the same desert. I can pay your debt if I love you. I can serve your term in prison if I love you very much. I can volunteer to do that. I can't take your sins away, because I can't abolish your responsibility, and I shouldn't offer to do so. Your responsibility has to stay with you. There's no vicarious redemption. There very probably, in fact, is no redemption at all. It's just a part of wish-thinking, and I don't think wish-thinking is good for people either.It even manages to pollute the central question, the word I just employed, the most important word of all: the word love, by making love compulsory, by saying you MUST love. You must love your neighbour as yourself, something you can't actually do. You'll always fall short, so you can always be found guilty. By saying you must love someone who you also must fear. That's to say a supreme being, an eternal father, someone of whom you must be afraid, but you must love him, too. If you fail in this duty, you're again a wretched sinner. This is not mentally or morally or intellectually healthy.And that brings me to the final objection - I'll condense it, Dr. Orlafsky - which is, this is a totalitarian system. If there was a God who could do these things and demand these things of us, and he was eternal and unchanging, we'd be living under a dictatorship from which there is no appeal, and one that can never change and one that knows our thoughts and can convict us of thought crime, and condemn us to eternal punishment for actions that we are condemned in advance to be taking. All this in the round, and I could say more, it's an excellent thing that we have absolutely no reason to believe any of it to be true.
Christopher Hitchens
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.
George Orwell
Everything is permitted, Nothing is true.
Oliver Bowden
Sometimes when you love someone so deeply, that is the thing that hurts the most.
Anthony T.Hincks
I tried your best and it didn't work, so now I'm going to try my best and I'm sure that I'll succeed!
Anthony T.Hincks
I never realized just how many things I really hated until you walked out the door and out of my life.
Anthony T.Hincks
I sing, not because I'm happy, but because I'm in love with the world.
Anthony T.Hincks
On even the darkest of days, the brightest thing in my life is you.
Anthony T.Hincks
I wish that I had been born a man, then I wouldn't be the boy that I am.
Anthony T.Hincks
Pink colors my world with love.
Anthony T.Hincks
When you hear the echoes of my mind, you'll know that I wasn't listening to what you said.
Anthony T.Hincks
..."SORRY."...Just doesn't cut it anymore!
Anthony T.Hincks
How do I know that you exist?That's just it. I don't!
Anthony T.Hincks
You never cease to be unique.
Anthony T.Hincks
When you think in silence you cannot speak your mind.
Anthony T.Hincks
Your smile carries my heart away every time that I see you.
Anthony T.Hincks
My soul pines for the color in my heart.
Anthony T.Hincks
Knowing when to be silent makes you seem wiser beyond your years.
Anthony T.Hincks
Smiles, rainbows and a grain of rice.I could survive on that!
Anthony T.Hincks
I was well-read but perhaps that only made me stupid.
Richard Smyth
When you stand on top of that mountain and you look out, you will know that you will never again look back.
Anthony T.Hincks
When you walk a tightrope, you don't want to be eating buttered popcorn.
Anthony T.Hincks
Each of us has no peers, because each of us is unique in who we are and what we have experienced.Anyone who tells you otherwise has quite obviously not met any of their peers either!
Anthony T.Hincks
The joy of having no friends is that I can do anything I want; when I want.The downside is, that I have no one to share it with.
Anthony T.Hincks
Shadows only come to life in our imaginations.Unfortunately for me, I've got a very vivid imagination.
Anthony T.Hincks
Don't eat the bread unless you want to leave bread crumbs.
Anthony T.Hincks
I have a quote for every occasion, then I remembered that I don't have that many occasions.
Anthony T.Hincks
When I hang upside down and write the wrong way up, will my letters be upside down or the right way up?
Anthony T.Hincks
A dove carries peace on its wings.
Anthony T.Hincks
Beauty is a female thing. That's why nature is so stunning.
Anthony T.Hincks
Don't be surprised when Death comes knocking. Be surprised when he goes away empty handed.
Anthony T.Hincks
They said that Superman was faster than a speeding train. If that's the case, how fast were his sperm and would Lois survive?It makes you think, doesn't it?
Anthony T.Hincks
A good cricketer never loses his nerve.He just bats on!
Anthony T.Hincks
When the Illuminati thought of their name, they were hiding in a darkened room with one candle.They are still hiding in that room with the same candle.
Anthony T.Hincks
Beauty is seeing a flower bloom in a garden or in nature.Artificial is seeing that same flower try and grow in a vase of water.
Anthony T.Hincks
Thought is what we start from: the simple, intimate, immediate datum. Matter is the inferred thing, the mystery.
C.S. Lewis
Manlius ... took care in his invitations, actively sought to exclude from his circle crude and vulgar men like Caius Valerius. But they were all around; it was Manlius who lived in a dream world, and his bubble of civility was becoming smaller and smaller. Caius Valerius, powerful member of a powerful family, had never even heard of Plato. A hundred, even fifty years before, such an absurdity would have been inconceivable. Now it was surprising if such a man did know anything of philosophy, and even if it was explained, he would not wish to understand.
Iain Pears
How many of us have lately taken the time out to look at the sky; marvel at the clouds; smell the flowers; or smelt the fresh scent of rain; bought a stranger a cup of tea or coffee; given our time to help another; or just taken time out to sit and watch people rush hither and tither; said "I love you"; smiled at a complete stranger; joined in with kids from the street to play a game?Sadly, I would have to say....not many.It's sad....
Anthony T.Hincks
The philosophic outlook rises above all sectarian controversy. It finds its own position not only by appreciating and synthesizing what is solidly based in the rival sects but also by capping them all with the keystone of nonduality.
Paul Brunton
The scepticism which men affect towards their higher inspirations is often not an honest doubt, but a guilty negligence, and is a sign of narrow mind and defective wisdom.
James Martineau
The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest-Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.
John Stuart Mill
I am my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Right, you've got a crooked sort of cross..." He consulted Unfogging the Future. "That means you're going to have 'trials and suffering' — sorry about that — but there's a thing that could be the sun... hang on... that means 'great happiness'... so you're going to suffer but be very happy...""You need your Inner Eye tested, if you ask me," said Ron, and they both had to stifle their laughs as Professor Trelawney gazed in their direction.
J.K. Rowling
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy offers this definition ofthe word "Infinite".Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some.Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, atotally stunning size, "wow, that's big", time. Infinity is just sobig that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy.Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringlyhuge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here.
Douglas Adams
The poor things keep calling in those – those pumbles, I think they're called – you know, the ones who mend pipes and things – ""Plumbers?"" – exactly, yes, but of course they're flummoxed.
J.K. Rowling