Quotes by British Authors - Page 47

It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored climate that seem to me the happiest but those in which a long stroke of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both.
T.S Eliot
Light quirks of music broken and uneven Make the soul dance upon a jig to Heav'n.
Alexander Pope
The course of nature is the art of God.
Edward Young
Mystery is the wisdom of blockheads.
Horace Walpole
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.
Leigh Hunt
From the intrinsic evidence of His creation the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician .
Sir James Jeans
He left the name at which the world grew pale To point a moral or adorn a tale.
Samuel Johnson
I am an arrogant and impatient listener but in the case of a few composers a very few when I hear a work I do not like I am convinced that it is my own fault. Verdi is one of those composers.
Benjamin Britten
Going to the opera like getting drunk is a sin that carries its own punishment with it and that a very severe one.
Hannah More
Soprano basso even the contralto Wished him five fathom under the Rialto.
Lord Byron
She was an aging singer who had to take every note above 'A' with her eyebrows.
Montague Glass
Why should the devil have all the good tunes?
Rowland Hill
A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.
Benny Green
The good composer is slowly discovered the bad composer is slowly found out.
Ernest Newman
Music first and last should sound well should allure and enchant the ear. Never mind the inner significance.
Thomas Beecham
Had I learned to fiddle I should have done nothing else.
Samuel Johnson
After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Aldous Huxley
Light quirks of music broken and uneven make the soul dance upon a jig of heaven.
Alexander Pope
Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony but organically I am incapable of a tune.
Charles Lamb
Opera purges men of those hesitations and worries which make it difficult for them to acknowledge their importance to themselves. A good performance of an opera that is provides a language for us to speak of ourselves as we have always known we should speak.
Hamish Swanston
Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once.
Robert Browning
Music sweeps by me as a messenger carrying a message that is not for me.
George Eliot
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
G.K. Chesterton
The Sonata is an essentially dramatic art form combining the emotional range in vivid presentation of a full-size stage drama with the terseness of a short story.
Donald Francis Tovey
Music touches places beyond our touching.
Keith Bosley
Never compose anything unless the not composing of it becomes a positive nuisance to you.
Gustav Hoist
Canned music is like audible wallpaper.
Alistair Cooke
Discord occasions a momentary distress to the ear which remains unsatisfied and even uneasy until it hears something better.
Charles Burney
I have sat through an Italian opera til for sheer pain and inexplicable anguish I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded street to solace myself with sounds which I was not obliged to follow and get rid of the distracting torment of endless fruitless barren attention!
Charles Lamb
A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.
Colin Wilson
I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is the language I don't understand.
Edward Appleton
It is the best of all trades to make songs and the second best to sing them.
Hilaire Belloc
We must each find our separate meaning in the persuasion of our days until we meet in the meaning of the world.
Christopher Fry
He mourns the dead who lives as they desire.
Edward Young
The mouse that hath but one hole is quickly taken.
George Edward Herbert
By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept Remembering thee.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
We must each find our separate meaning in the persuasion of our days until we meet in the meaning of the world.
Christopher Fry
Because it's there.
G. H. L. Mallory
It is easier to influence strong than weak characters in life.
Margot Asquith
The greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise as the greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure.
John Ruskin
Applause is the spur of noble minds the end and aim of weak ones.
Charles Caleb Colton
We talk on principle but we act on interest.
Walter Savage Landor
My advice about acting? Speak clearly don't bump into people and if you must have motivation think of your pay packet on Friday.
Noël Coward
It is the north wind that lashes men into Vikings it is the soft luscious south wind which lulls them to lotus dreams.
Ouida
I always felt that I hadn't achieved what I wanted to achieve. I always felt I could get better. That's the whole incentive.
Virginia Wade
I take it that what all men are really after is some form of perhaps only some formula of peace.
Joseph Conrad
One starts an action simply because one must do something.
T.S Eliot
Anxiety and conscience are a powerful pair of dynamos. Between them they have ensured that I shall work hard but they cannot ensure that one shall work at anything worthwhile.
Arnold J. Toynbee
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every living organism to live beyond its income.
Samuel Butler
Good humor like the jaundice makes every one of its own complexion.
Elizabeth Inchbald
Your distress about life might mean you have been living for the wrong reason not that you have no reason for living.
Tom O'Connor
What makes life dreary is want of motive.
George Eliot
It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good and we must hunger for them.
George Eliot
One man with a dream at pleasure Shall go forth and conquer a crown And three with a new song's measure Can trample an empire down.
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
The secret of discipline is motivation. When a man is sufficiently motivated discipline will take care of itself.
Sir Alexander Paterson
Grandchildren don't make a man feel old it's the knowledge that he's married to a grandmother.
G. Norman Collie
Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children now I have six children and no theories.
John Wilmot
No matter how old a mother is she still watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
There is none In all this cold and hollow world no fount Of deep strong deathless love save that within A mother's heart.
Felicia D. Hemans
A mother is a mother still The holiest thing alive.
Hartley Coleridge