Quotes by British Authors - Page 41

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
Bertrand Russell
Ah, fairest maiden, thine beauty doth maketh mine loins stir, and mine cup runneth over.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
....the perfect beauty of the pattern that each raindrop makes as it joins its puddle.
Jay Woodman
Like a carpenter with two broken legs at the bottom of a beautiful staircase. Maybe I can't climb the stairs, ma'am, but at least let me admire the workmanship.
James Anderson
You despise the real bourgeois classes for all their snobbishness and their snobbish voices and ways. You do, don't you? Yet all you put in their place is a horrid little refusal to have nasty thoughts or do nasty things or be nasty in any way. Do you know that every great thing in the story of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?
John Fowles
...With the failure of the imagination to present form the mind discovers that it has the capacity to conceive of the infinite, and thus has the power to transcend everything that sense can measure and thus present. The sublime feeling in this case arises from the play between the finite nature of the senses and the infinite capacity of reason.
Nicholas Gane
Do not all charms fly / At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
John Keats 1795-1821
It seems comfortable to sink down on a sofa in a corner, to look, to listen. Then it happens that two figures standing with their backs against the window appear against the branches of a spreading tree. With a shock of emotion one feels 'There are figures without features robed in beauty'. In the pause that follows while the ripples spread, the girl to whom one should be talking says to herself, 'He is old'. But she is wrong. It is not age; it is that a drop has fallen; another drop. Time has given the arrangement another shake. Out we creep from the arch of the currant leaves, out into a wider world. The true order of things – this is our perpetual illusion – is now apparent. Thus in a moment, in a drawing-room, our life adjusts itself to the majestic march of day across the sky.
Virginia Woolf
Women incorporate the values of the male sexual objectifiers within themselves. Catharine MacKinnon calls this being "thingified" in the head (MacKinnon, 1989). They learn to treat their own bodies as objects separate from themselves. Bartky explains how this works: the wolf whistle sexually objectifies a woman from without with the result that, ``"The body which only a moment before I inhabited with such ease now floods my consciousness. I have been made into an object'' (Bartky, 1990, p. 27). She explains that it is not sufficient for a man simply to look at the woman secretly, he must make her aware of his looking with the whistle.She must, "be made to know that I am a 'nice piece of ass': I must be made to see myself as they see me'' (p. 27). The effect of such male policing behaviour is that, "Subject to the evaluating eye of the male connoisseur, women learn to evaluate themselves first and best'" (Bartky, 1990, p. 28). Women thus become alienated from their own bodies.
Sheila Jeffreys
The mystery which underlies the beauty of women is never raised above the reach of all expression until it has claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls.
Wilkie Collins
She really was pretty, for a grown-up person, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identify to her for the asking, as my father did.
Neil Gaiman
She is not fair to outward viewAs many maidens be;Her loveliness I never knewUntil she smiled on me.Oh! then I saw her eye was bright,A well of love, a spring of light.
Hartley Coleridge
Bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers, and when it wasn't raining a diamond dust took over which veiled and yet magnified all things
Laurie Lee
There is a face beneath this mask, but it isn't me. I'm no more that face than I am the muscles beneath it, or the bones beneath that.
Steve Moore
Life is a dance more than it is an assertion and there is more health in dynamism or fluidity than there is rigidity and stasis.
Oli Anderson
Just because a door appears closed it does not mean that it is locked - nor that it will not open with the right heart, call or touch
Rasheed Ogunlaru
There were only seven years between the first and last Beatles albums. That's nothing, seven years, when you think of how their hairstyles changed and their music changed. Some bands now go seven years without hardly bothering to do anything.
Nick Hornby
Don't make changes to suit others, stay true to yourself.
Steven Redhead
Because there was no pre-existing patrician elite, those successful in the new book industry could write very swiftly to the top of the social hierarchy.
Andrew Pettegree
People don't really change, they just adapt to circumstances.
Ruth Ahmed
The misconception of something being a certainty sometimes gets to me until I remember we can change most things consciously.
Jay Woodman
For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly: you and I may have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps it came with the vibrations from a woman's glance.
George Eliot
Fill the world with acid rain clouds and you will be in a new era of evolution, due to the changed electromagnetic frequencies emissions and light emissions from the lightning clouds. A new era of global environmental radiation!
Steven Magee
Modify the environmental radiation and you will change the course of evolution.
Steven Magee
Mankind willfully changing the global electromagnetic radiation environment has created what I expect will become known as the man-made evolution era.
Steven Magee
People are always changing themselves and their world, dear. Very few of the changes are new. We rather confuse change and newness, I think. What is truly new never changes.""You speak in riddles, aged progenitor.""The world worships a certain kind of newness. People are always talking about a new car, or a new drink or p-p-play or house, but these things are not truly new, are they? They begin to get old the minute you acquire them. New is not in things. New is within us. The truly new is something that is new forever: you. Every morning of your life and every evening, every moment is new. You have never lived this moment before and you never will again. In this sense the new is also the eternal.
Tony Hendra
We live in a society where those that do the greatest damage to humanity and nature reap the greatest financial rewards.
Steven Magee
[Tolstoy] denounced [many historians'] lamentable tendency to simplify. The experts stumble onto a battlefield, into a parliament or public square, and demand, "Where is he? Where is he?" "Where is who?" "The hero, of course! The leader, the creator, the great man!" And having found him, they promptly ignore all his peers and troops and advisors. They close their eyes and abstract their Napoleon from the mud and the smoke and the masses on either side, and marvel at how such a figure could possibly have prevailed in so many battles and commanded the destiny of an entire continent. "There was an eye to see in this man," wrote Thomas Carlyle about Napoleon in 1840, "a soul to dare and do. He rose naturally to be the King. All men saw that he was such."But Tolstoy saw differently. "Kings are the slaves of history," he declared. "The unconscious swarmlike life of mankind uses every moment of a king's life as an instrument for its purposes." Kings and commanders and presidents did not interest Tolstoy. History, his history, looks elsewhere: it is the study of infinitely incremental, imperceptible change from one state of being (peace) to another (war).The experts claimed that the decisions of exceptional men could explain all of history's great events. For the novelist, this belief was evidence of their failure to grasp the reality of an incremental change brought about by the multitude's infinitely small actions.
Daniel Tammet
Change, it seems, is inevitable. And so is compromise.
Fennel Hudson
There are no electromagnetic field (EMF) book millionaires yet, but that may change with the roll out of the fifth generation (5G) wireless networks.
Steven Magee
If you think that climate change and global warming are hoaxes, then you are easily fooled.
Steven Magee
If you think that climate change and global warming are not going to affect you, then you are easily misled.
Steven Magee
The human will be the only mammal in history to fully understand that its own self inflicted extinction is well underway.
Steven Magee
We are in the process of finding out what filling billions of acres with huge wind turbines does to the global environment.
Steven Magee
We are in the process of finding out what filling billions of acres with electrified glass that emits electromagnetic intereference (EMI) does to the global environment.
Steven Magee
If you're a square peg in a society full of round holes, it's time to change the playing board.
Anthony T.Hincks
When you change your dress,you want to look your best.But when you change your lover,it's simply for another.
Anthony T.Hincks
I felt like a Porsche that had learned it wasn't a bicycle anymore but was still taking part in bicycle races.
Neil Gaiman & Michael Reaves
I want to visit the snow in Antarctica before global warming turns it into a tropical paradise.
Steven Magee
All I know is that I've wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I'd get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But I don't want it anymore, I want something else now, something warm and sheltering, something I can turn to, regardless of what I do, regardless of who I become. Something that will just be there, always, like tomorrow's sky. That's what I want now, and I think it's what you should want too. But it will be too late soon. We'll become too set to change. If we don't take our chance now, another may never come for either of us.
Kazuo Ishiguro
New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled the humiliating question arises 'Why then are you not taking part in them?
H.G.Wells
You should never make fun of something that a person can't change about themselves.
Phil Lester
For the khan, we will take their cities, their women, and their lands. This is the great raid, the farthest strike in the history of the nation of Genghis. We will not be stopped.
Conn Iggulden
You don’t need princes to save you. I don’t have a lot of patience for stories in which women are rescued by men.
Neil Gaiman
But an ordinary day can mark the beginning of an extraordinary journey!
Elizabeth George
Having studied the toxic biological effects of wireless radio frequency (RF) radiation, I find it amazing that women will willfully strap on two radio frequency antennas to their breasts in the form of an underwired bra. The wireless industry knows the underwired bra as a dipole antenna or doublet.
Steven Magee
At her first bleeding a woman meets her power. During her bleeding years she practices it. At menopause she becomes it. Traditional Native American saying
Lucy H. Pearce
The most difficult thing for a wise woman to do is to pretend to be a foolish one.
W Somerset Maugham
What I feel now doesn't matter at all? But at what point am I entitled to say to myself, what I am feeling now is valid? After all, Anna-' Here Tommy turned to face her: 'one can't go through one's whole life in phases. There must be a goal somewhere.' His eyes gleamed out hatred; and it was with difficulty that Anna said: 'If you're suggesting that I've reached a goal, and I'm judging you from some superior point, then it's not true.''Phases,' he insisted. 'Stages. Growing pains.''But I think that's how women see-people. Certainly their own children. In the first place, there's always been nine months of not knowing whether the baby would be a girl or a boy. Sometimes I wonder what Janet would have been like if she'd been born a boy. Don't you see! And then babies go through one stage after another, and then they are children. When a woman looks at a child she sees all the things he's been at the same time. When I look at Janet sometimes I see her as a small baby and I feel her inside my belly and I see her as various sizes of small girl, all at the same time.' Tommy's stare was accusing and sarcastic, but she persisted: 'That's how women see things. Everything in a sort of continuous creative stream-well, isn't it natural we should?
Doris Lessing
Understanding why so many western women are giving birth to unnaturally large babies that either damage the birth canal or will not fit down it is one of the greatest challenges to modern medicine.
Steven Magee
She was decidedly attractive, he saw, but in an ill-natured, ungracious way. Because of his connection with Fitzgerald, Carstairs & Scott, Johnnie had an extensive knowledge of the external appearance and different modes of behavior of a great variety of attractive women: they came up to the office in shoals, with their nails dipped in blood and their faces covered with pale cocoa. And some were charming and simple beneath their masks, and some were complex and arrogant. This girl belonged to the latter type, the type which would ignore or stare surlily at him if he spoke to them, until they learned that the actual money came through him, when their manner sweetened wonderfully. This girl wore her attractiveness not as a girl should, simply, consciously, as a happy crown of pleasure, but rather as a murderous utensil with which she might wound indiscriminately right and left, and which she would only employ to please when it suited her purpose. They were like bad-tempered street-walkers, without walking the street.
Patrick Hamilton
[In 16th century European society] Marriage was the triumphal arch through which women, almost without exception, had to pass in order to reach the public eye. And after marriage followed, in theory, the total self-abnegation of the woman.
Antonia Fraser
I do not wish to be a coward like the father of mankind and throw the blame upon a woman.
Ouida
A woman's guess is much more accurate than a man's certainty.
Rudyard Kipling
At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.
P.G. Wodehouse
Any woman who is sure of her own wits, is a match, at any time, for a man who is not sure of his own temper.
Wilkie Collins
Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
Virginia Woolf
The immense success of our life, is I think, that our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common things that nothing can touch it.
Virginia Woolf
How life progresses all depends on what you focus on then pursue.
Steven Redhead
Make life a wonder to behold.
Steven Redhead