Quotes by British Authors - Page 36

I have never yet met a healthy person who worries very much about his health or a really good person who worries much about his own soul.
J.B.S. Haldane
We are a rather big-headed little species in a vast cosmos which can do without us very well.
Rev. George Carey
The three great apostles of practical atheism that make converts without persecuting and retain them without preaching are Wealth Health and Power.
Charles Caleb Colton
As for future life every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.
Charles Darwin
One's religion is whatever he is most interested in.
James M. Barrie
The Pope is barely Catholic enough for some converts.
John Ayscough
I'm not really a Jew just Jew-ish not the whole hog.
Jonathan Miller
The idea that He would take his attention away from the universe in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds is just so unlikely I can't go along with it.
Quentin Crisp
The church exists for the sake of those outside it.
William Temple
If you can't believe in God the chances are your God is too small.
J.B. Phillips
He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the Church he currently did not attend was Catholic.
Kingsley Amis
And so do his sisters and his cousins and his aunts! His sisters and his cousins Whom he reckons up by dozens And his aunts!
W.S. Gilbert
Reflect upon your present blessings of which every man has many-not on your past misfortunes of which all men have some.
Charles Dickens
The horror of that moment the King went on "I shall never forget." "You will though " the Queen said "if you don't make a memorandum of it."
Lewis Carroll
Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.
Sydney J. Harris
I have always found that each step we take in life is to be regretted-if we once begin to wonder how many other steps might have been possible.
John Oliver Hobbes
If you have behaved badly repent make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
Aldous Huxley
The only causes of regret are laziness outbursts of temper hurting others prejudice jealousy and envy.
Germaine Greer
Your luck is how you treat people.
Bridget O'Donnell
Luck ... taps once in a lifetime at everybody's door but if industry does not open it luck goes away.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Chance works for us when we are good captains.
George Meredith
Good and bad luck is a synonym in the great majority of instances for good and bad judgment.
John Chatfield
The feast of reason and the flow of soul.
Alexander Pope
You must always be open to your luck. You cannot force it but you can recognize it.
Henry Moore
Talent on its own sat gracefully only on the very young. After a certain age it was what you did with it that counted.
Liza Cody
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
George Orwell
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Aldous Huxley
Reason is God's gift but so are the passions. Reason is as guilty as passion.
Cardinal Newman
Reason is an emotion for the sexless.
Heathcote Williams
A life based on reason will always require to be balanced by an occasional bout of violent and irrational emotion for the instinctual tribes must be satisfied.
Cyril Connolly
The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.
Cyril Connolly
Nothing which is at all times and in every way agreeable to us can have objective reality. It is of the very nature of the real that it should have sharp corners and rough edges that it should be resistant should be itself. Dream-furniture is the only kind on which you never stub your toes or bang your knee.
C.S. Lewis
Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality because reality is a spirit.
G.K. Chesterton
If anything is poisoning our lives and weakening our society it is reality - and not the fabrication of television writers and producers.
Martin Moloney
I have nothing to offer but blood toil tears and sweat.
Winston Churchill
Human kind cannot bear very much reality.
T.S Eliot
Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.
George Eliot
Moderation in war is imbecility.
Admiral John Fisher
When one's expectations are reduced to zero one really appreciates everything one does have.
Stephen Hawking
A fool or idiot is one who expects things to happen that never can happen.
George Eliot
There is an illusion that has much to do with ... most of our unhappiness. ... We expect too much.
Joseph Farrell
We do not write as we want but as we can.
W Somerset Maugham
Real life is to most men ... a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.
Bertrand Russell
Genius does what it must talent does what it can.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
If we are to survive on this planet there must be compromises.
Storm Jameson
People are lucky and unlucky ... according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.
Samuel Butler
Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim.
Graham Greene
As we advance in life we learn the limits of our abilities.
J. A. Froude
No man can climb out beyond the limitations of his own character.
John Morley
The scornful nostril and the high head gather not the odors that lie on the track of truth.
George Eliot
Truth has rough flavors if we bite it through.
George Eliot
In science read by preference the newest works in literature the oldest. The classic literature is always modern.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for the treasures of India.
Edward Gibbon
I had always assumed that cliche was a suburb of Paris until I discovered it to be a street in Oxford.
Philip Guedalla
It's better to be quotable than to be honest.
Tom Stoppard
Geography is about maps But biography is about chaps.
E.C. Bentley
The butler entered the room a solemn procession of one.
P.G. Wodehouse
Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
Cyril Connolly
Oats n.s. A grain which in England is generally given to horses but in Scotland supports the people.
Samuel Johnson
Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.
G.K. Chesterton