Quotes by British Authors - Page 40

It is by sitting down to write every morning that he becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.
Gerald Brenan
Whatever the ups and downs of detail within our limited experience the larger whole is primarily beautiful.
Gregory Bateson
I learned really to practice mustard seed faith and positive thinking and remarkable things happened.
Sir John Walton
We think in generalities but we live in detail.
Alfred North Whitehead
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
George Eliot
Disease can be seen as a call for personal transformation through metamorphosis. It is a transition from the death of your old self into the birth of your new.
Tom O'Connor
Clear your mind of "can't."
Samuel Johnson
Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds.
George Eliot
Sunshine is delicious rain is refreshing wind braces us up snow is exhilarating there is really no such thing as bad weather only different kinds of good weather.
John Ruskin
I am dying but otherwise I am quite well.
Edith Sitwell
We are so outnumbered there's only one thing to do. We must attack.
Sir Andrew Cunningham
My disease is one of the best things that has happened to me it has pulled me out of a quietly desperate life toward one full of love and hope.
Tom O'Connor
It is good to act as if. It is even better to grow to the point where it is no longer an act.
Charles Caleb Colton
If you would be powerful pretend to be powerful.
Home Tooke
Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized by a madness which forces them to commit the very acts which makes it certain that what they dread shall happen.
Dame Rebecca West
Doubt indulged soon becomes doubt realized.
Frances Ridley Havergal
A person who can write a long letter with ease cannot write ill.
Jane Austen
To know how to say what others only know how to think is what makes men poets or sages and to dare to say what others only dare to think makes men martyrs or reformers-or both.
Elizabeth Charles
Persistent prophecy is a familiar way of assuring the event.
George R. Gissing
I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse.
Florence Nightingale
Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good behave yourself and never mind the rest.
Beatrix Potter
You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face the friends the health and the children you have earned.
Fay Weldon
I am one of those people who are blessed ... with a nature which has to interfere. If I see a thing that needs doing I do it.
Margery Allingham
If we choose to be no more than clods of clay then we shall be used as clods of clay for braver feet to tread on.
Marie Corelli
Thousands upon thousands are yearly brought into a state of real poverty by their great anxiety not to be thought poor.
William Cobbett
It is no use blaming the men-we made them what they are-and now it is up to us to try and make ourselves-the makers of men-a little more responsible.
Nancy Astor
It seems to me probably that any one who has a series of intolerable positions to put up with must have been responsible for them to some extent... they have contributed to it by impatience or intolerance or brusqueness-or some provocation.
Robert Hugh Benson
The optimism of a healthy mind is indefatigable.
Margery Allingham
Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.
George Meredith
An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.
George Eliot
Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.
George Eliot
We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion just as affectively as by bombs.
Kenneth Clark
The pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity the optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
L. P. Jacks
Happiness is not a matter of events it depends upon the tides of the mind.
Alice Meynell
I like living. I have sometimes been wildly despairingly acutely miserable racked with sorrow but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
Agatha Christie
The world is like a mirror frown at it and it frowns at you. Smile and it smiles too.
Herbert Samuel
All seems infected that the infected spy as all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.
Alexander Pope
What we see depends mainly on what we look for.
John Lubbock
The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it and it will in turn look sourly upon you laugh at it and with it and it is a jolly kind companion.
William Makepeace Thackeray
A woman's hopes are woven of sunbeams a shadow annihilates them.
George Eliot
To think of losing is to lose already.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat.
Victoria
A good heart will help you to a bonny face my lad ... and a bad one will turn the bonniest into something worse than ugly.
Emily Brontë
It is only in sorrow bad weather masters us in joy we face the storm and defy it.
Amelia Barr
The pure the beautiful the bright That stirred our hearts in youth The impulse to a wordless prayer The dreams of love and truth The longings after something lost The spirit's yearning cry The strivings after better hopes These things can never die.
Sarah Doudney
I actually remember feeling delight at two o'clock in the morning when the baby woke for his feed because I so longed to have another look at him.
Margaret Drabble
Dream lofty dreams and as you dream so shall you become. Your vision is the promise of what you shall at last unveil.
John Ruskin
Popular applause veers with the wind.
John Bright
A majority is always better than the best repartee.
Benjamin Disraeli
I always voted at my party's call And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
W.S. Gilbert
Who is the dark horse he has in his stable?
William Thackeray
I have the perfect simplified tax form for government. Why don't they just print our money with a return address on it?
Bob Hope
Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.
Margaret Thatcher
Harold Wilson is going around the country stirring up apathy.
William Whitelaw
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of polities'. All issues are political issues.
George Orwell
As I learnt very early in my life in Whitehall the acid test of any political question is: What is the alternative?
Lord Trent
Politics is more dangerous than war for in war you are only killed once.
Winston Churchill
There are two problems in my life. The political ones are insoluble and the economic ones are incomprehensible.
Alexander Douglas-Home
I have never regarded politics as the arena of morals. It is the arena of interests.
Aneurin Bevan
If people have to choose between freedom and sandwiches they will take sandwiches.
Lord Boyd-Orr