Quotes by British Authors - Page 37

The ugliest of trades have their moments of pleasure. Now if I was a grave digger or even a hangman there are some people I could work for with a great deal of enjoyment.
Douglas Jerrold
My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me.
Benjamin Disraeli
India is a geographical term. It is no more a United Nation than the Equator.
Winston Churchill
He has all of the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
Winston Churchill
In baiting a mousetrap with cheese always leave room for the mouse.
Saki
Sherard Blaw the dramatist who had discovered himself and who had given so unstintingly of his discovery to the world.
Saki
Worthless as wither'd weeds.
Emily Brontë
Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best.
Max Beerbohm
A diplomat these days is nothing but a head waiter who is allowed to sit down occasionally.
Peter Ustinov
Heat madam! It was so dreadful that I found there was nothing for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones.
Sydney Smith
Quality not quantity is my measure.
Douglas Jerrold
Questioning is not the mode of conversation among gentlemen.
Samuel Johnson
He that would pun would pick a pocket.
Alexander Pope
I never knew an enemy to puns who was not an ill-natured man.
Charles Lamb
I have always been a quarter of an hour before my time and it has made a man of me.
Lord Horatio Nelson
My object all sublime I shall achieve in time - To let the punishment fit the crime.
W.S. Gilbert
It is to the middle class we must look for the safety of England.
William Thackeray
Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution.
G.K. Chesterton
A psychiatrist is a man who goes to the Folies-Bergere and looks at the audience.
Mervyn Stockwood
Schizophrenic behaviour is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.
R.D. Laing
The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveller with his patient.
R.D. Laing
The first years of man must make provision for the last.
Samuel Johnson
I recommend you to take care of the minutes for the hours will take care of themselves.
Lord Chesterfield
Fear not but trust in Providence Wherever thou may'st be.
Thomas Haynes Bayly
What men want is not knowledge but certainty.
Bertrand Russell
The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property.
John Locke
You cannot demonstrate an emotion or prove an aspiration.
John Morley
What we call progress is the exchange of one Nuisance for another Nuisance.
Havelock Ellis
An acre of performance is worth the whole world of promise.
James Howell
The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday - but never jam today.
Lewis Carroll
Now here you see it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else you must run at least twice as fast as that!
Lewis Carroll
The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.
Alfred North Whitehead
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
Alfred North Whitehead
New roads new ruts.
G.K. Chesterton
Every gain made by individuals or society is almost instantly taken for granted.
Aldous Huxley
All progress is based upon the universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
Samuel Butler
Removing the faults in a stage-coach may produce a perfect stage-coach but it is unlikely to produce the first motor car.
Edward de Bono
All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.
Edward Gibbon
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is very important.
Bertrand Russell
My brother-in-law had to give up his last job because of illness. His boss became sick of him.
Henny Youngman
It is a fact of history that those who seek to withdraw from its great experiments usually end up being overwhelmed by them.
Barbara Ward
Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties.
Samuel Johnson
The human mind prefers to be spoonfed with the thoughts of others but deprived of such nourishment it will reluctantly begin to think for itself- and such thinking remember is original thinking and may have valuable results.
Agatha Christie
Times of general calamity and confusion have ever been productive of the greatest minds. The purest ore is produced from the hottest furnace and the brightest thunderbolt is elicited from the darkest storms.
Charles Caleb Colton
I wish I were with some of the wild people that run in the woods and know nothing about accomplishments!
Joanna Baillie
A great man is one who seizes the vital issue in a complex question what we might call the jugular vein of the whole organism and spends his energies upon that.
Joseph Rickaby
It isn't that they can't see the solution it's that they can't see the problem.
G.K. Chesterton
A good problem statement often includes: (a) what is known (b) what is unknown and (c) what is sought.
Edward Hodnett
The man who most vividly realizes a difficulty is the man most likely to overcome it.
Joseph Farrell
In pride in reas'ning pride our error lies All quit their sphere and rush into the skies. Pride still is aiming at the bless'd abodes Men would be angels angels would be gods.
Alexander Pope
Stone walls do not a prison make Nor iron bars a cage Minds innocent and quiet take That for an hermitage.
Richard Lovelace
I do not believe that any peacock envies another peacock his tail because every peacock is persuaded that his own tail is the finest in the world. The consequence of this is that peacocks are peaceable birds.
Bertrand Russell
There is a paradox in pride: it makes some men ridiculous but prevents others from becoming so.
Charles Caleb Colton
You must stir it and stump it and blow your own trumpet or trust me you haven't a chance.
W.S. Gilbert
Pride is seldom delicate: it will please itself with very mean advantages.
Samuel Johnson
We hate some persons because we do not know them and will not know them because we hate them.
Charles Caleb Colton
Opinions founded on prejudice are always sustained with the greatest violence.
Lord Francis Jeffrey
Passion and prejudice govern the world only under the name of reason.
John Wesley
Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It was not reasoned into him and cannot be reasoned out.
Sydney Smith
Sir a woman preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well: but you are surprised to find it done at all.
Samuel Johnson