Quotes by British Authors - Page 491

To live without zest is to live without an appetite for new experiences, to miss out on the spice, the juice, the edge that makes life thrilling. It is to live with deadened, flattened senses, with your passions unaroused and your curiosity untapped.
Ella Berthoud & Susan Elderkin
He had made a vow, a private promise to the world in the long dark watches of the night, that if he did survive then in the great afterward he would always try to be kind, to live a good, quiet life. Like Candide, he would cultivate his garden. quietly. And that would be his redemption. Even if he could add only a feather to the balance it would be some kind of repayment for being spared. When it was all over and the reckoning fell due, it may be that he would be in need of that feather.
Kate Atkinson
The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into our children’s lunch boxes. The last thing we want to admit is that the bickering of the playground perfectly presages the machinations of the boardroom, that our social hierarchies are merely an extension of who got picked first for the kickball team, and that grown-ups still get divided into bullies and fatties and crybabies. What’s a kid to find out? Presumably we lord over them an exclusive deed to sex, but this pretense flies so fantastically in the face of fact that it must result from some conspiratorial group amnesia. […] In truth, we are bigger, greedier versions of the same eating, shitting, rutting ruck, hell-bent on disguising from somebody, if only from a three-year-old, that pretty much all we do is eat and shit and rut. The secret is there is no secret. That is what we really wish to keep from our kids, and its supression is the true collusion of adulthood, the pact we make, the Talmud we protect.
Lionel Shriver
Time is not something to be killed. Doing so suffocates a part of us, writing off part of our life that could, or rather should, be spent doing something meaningful.
Fennel Hudson
Life can be impossibly tough. At times it seems like there is no escape from either the pressure or monotony of a world where you are corralled into being something or someone you are not. But there is an escape, to more peaceful and gentler places, and a happier state of mind.
Fennel Hudson
We are so blinkered by progress, so preoccupied with where we want to go and how fast we can travel, that many of us have lost the ability to simply ‘stop’.
Fennel Hudson
Quality of life is more important than the quantity
Marilyn L Rice
The voice of protest is the voice of another and an ancient civilization which seems to have bred in us the instinct to enjoy and fight rather than to suffer and understand.
Virginia Woolf
I believe,” he said gently, “we all have a perfect right to make ourselves unhappy if that is what we freely choose. But I am not sure we have the right to allow our own unhappiness to cause someone else’s. The trouble with life sometimes is that we are all in it together.
Mary Balogh
As you begin to Awaken.. You discover yourself sitting in nature.. flowing like the river.. Trying to understand the purpose.. then realizing "Nature is Happening, that is its purpose".. You are just like the river flowing through nature.. Your purpose is to be like nature. Start Now.. in the precious moments.. for its the only time that exists.
Jonathan Bailey
Here now in his triumph where all things falter, Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,As a god self-slain on his own strange altar, Death lies dead.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
I mean that success has come early. And that is dangerous. Always dangerous.
Agatha Christie
Life is a long boring drive on an empty road punctuated by special moments that make the journey worth taking.
Chloe Thurlow
See yourself as a long-term work in progress, not a short-term project of preservation.
Oli Anderson
Volume II, Chapter 4"How unwise had the wanderers been, who had deserted its shelter, entangled themselves in the web of society, and entered on what men of the world call "life,"—that labyrinth of evil, that scheme of mutual torture. To live, according to this sense of the word, we must not only observe and learn, we must also feel; we must not be mere spectators of action, we must act; we must not describe, but be subjects of description. Deep sorrow must have been the inmate of our bosoms; fraud must have lain in wait for us; the artful must have deceived us; sickening doubt and false hope must have chequered our days; hilarity and joy, that lap the soul in ecstasy, must at times have possessed us. Who that knows what "life" is, would pine for this feverish species of existence? I have lived. I have spent days and nights of festivity; I have joined in ambitious hopes, and exulted in victory: now,—shut the door on the world, and build high the wall that is to separate me from the troubled scene enacted within its precincts. Let us live for each other and for happiness; let us seek peace in our dear home, near the inland murmur of streams, and the gracious waving of trees, the beauteous vesture of earth, and sublime pageantry of the skies. Let us leave "life," that we may live.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
The paths you walk in life should always be by design, either consciously or subconsciously.
Steven Redhead
People see stories everywhere," Regine says. "That's what my father used to say. We take random events and we string them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn't true." She glances back at Seth. "We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we'd go crazy.
Patrick Ness
We all make mistakes. The more you punish yourself for them, the harder it is to live.
Kristina Adams
I am moving the rudder, shifting the course of my life. I have not thought of it this way before, but that is what I am doing. Taking my fate into my own hands, turning dreams into reality. And there is nothing more sacred or precious than that. To choose a direction: but how often do we miss the signposts?
Carol Drinkwater
What life means has individual answers for each of us.
Jay Woodman
...[T]here are days when emptiness is spacious, and non-existence elevating.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
I admire a contented mind. I revere enjoyment of the simple things. I can imagine that contentment has a high degree of truth. But the human tendency is to take good as normal, and one's natural right, and so no cause for satisfaction and pleasure. This is accompanied by the habit of regarding bad as abnormal and a personal outrage.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
I say to life, "You are very hard", and I also say: "We are blind, we prefer to be blind. It is easier...". Life has to be hard to have any affect on us; even now we hardly notice it. Beyond that can one go? I must. I add, "We are also blind to the miracles of good that come to us. We hardly heed them, we even protest against them". Then I am left where I was, appalled by the hardness of life, knowing we are forced to be unwilling heroes. Suddenly I wonder--is all hardness justified because we are so slow in realizing that life was meant to be heroic? Greatness is required of us. That is life's aim and justification, and we poor fools have for centuries been trying to make it convenient, manageable, pliant to our will. It is also peaceful and tender and funny and dull. Yes, all that.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
I now view life as a complex and unpredictable affair that cannot be mastered. It can be embraced. It can be negotiated more or less skillfully. But mastered? Not a chance.
Gary Hayden
However smart and determined you are, your life is always going to consist of light and darkness, joy and sadness, good or bad, up and down, yang and yin.
Gary Hayden
You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality. When at last age has assembled you together, will it not be easy to let it all go, lived, balanced, over?
Florida Scott-Maxwell
Some wounds were worth bearing for the healing they brought.
Dianna Hardy
We were immortal, did you know that? Did you feel it like me? We had the world at our feet and we were going to live forever. Then came life – growing inside you – and I became mortal.
Dianna Hardy
What fun it would be," he thought, "if one didn't have to think about happiness!
Aldous Huxley
Oh, let us love our occupations,Bless the squire and his relations,Live upon our daily rations,And always know our proper stations.
Charles Dickens
There is a lot of unhappiness in this world. Try not to feed it.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Ties are straightened and expressions banished.
Rana Dasgupta
There's nothing like a good, long sleep to allow unpleasantness to recede into the past.
David Michie
In Buddhism we also interprete Dharma to mean 'cessation,' as in the end of dissatisfaction, the end of dukkha. This is the purpose of Buddha's teachings.
David Michie
It’s better to make baby steps in the right direction than big steps in the wrong direction!
Lily Amis
When I am in balance with the vibration of my life, I am able to manifest what is needed, both for me and for others.
Debbie A. Anderson
...life didn't always have to be so serious. That life was to be lived. That life was one great adventure, to be lived well and to the full.
Tillie Cole
The natives who saw him walking alone, and later brought him back to the town for burial, said he was whistling when he went. Being simple peasants, growers of yams and cassava, they did not know what the whistling was. It was a tune called "Spanish Harlem.
Frederick Forsyth
Your life is the proof that you have a purposeYou are the treasure that you are searching for
Mimi Novic
Life is brutally short, and there's only one go at it. We don't go for the old myths about helping somebody as we travel along life's path or our living will have been in vain. It's for now. Not tomorrow. But now.
Mick Norman
What can I say at seventy-five? "Thank God for my good life,and for all the love that has been given to me.
Agatha Christie
Life is like a plate of chillies, what you do today might just burn your ass tomorrow!
Hazim Bangwar
Don't take life to seriously, its not like you're going to get out alive! #Life
Hazim Bangwar
The plain unwelcome fact is that sometimes life stymies you.
Aidan Chambers
Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made ...
Robert Browning
These were good people and they had been good to us and we had therefore had a good time. To conclude otherwise was frightening, raising the specter of some unnameable quantity without which we could not abide, but which we could not summon on demand, least of all by proceeding in virtuous accordance with an established formula.You regarded redemption as an act of will. You disparaged people (people like me) for their cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions, because to fail to embrace the simple fineness of being alive betrayed a weakness of character. You always hated finicky eaters, hypochondriacs, and snobs who turned their noses up at Terms of Endearment just because it was popular. Nice eats, nice place, nice folks- what more could I possibly want? Besides, the good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job. So if you believed with sufficient industry that we had had a good time with Brian and Louise in theory, then we would have had a good time in fact. The only hint that in truth you’d found our afternoon laborous was that your enthusiasm was excessive.
Lionel Shriver
...[T]he mechanics of life should never be allowed to interfere with living.
Jan Struther
You can live your whole life not realising that what you're looking for is right in front of you.
David Nicholls
If you had to relive your life exactly as it was – same successes and failures, same happiness, same miseries, same mixture of comedy and tragedy – would you want to? Was it worth it?
Gavin Extence
To neglect ones own ability to laugh is the greatest form of Blasphemy, for to laugh is to pray.
Ilyas Kassam
We touch the last reality directly in prayer.
P.T. Forsyth
I'll pray for you.""That's very kind of you.""I can't spare you a whole rosary, you know. Just a decade. I've got such a long list of people. I take them in order and they get a decade about once a week.
Evelyn Waugh
If God be near a church, it must pray. And if he be not there, one of the first tokens of his absence will be a slothfulness in prayer.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
This perpetual hurry of business and company ruins me in soul if not in body. More solitude and earlier hours!
William Wilberforce
Man in his usual perversity turns the footstool into a throne from whence he would feign direct the Almighty as to what He ought to do, giving the onlooker the impression that if God had half the compassion that those who pray (?) have, all would quickly be right
Arthur W. Pink
Again, "Pray without ceasing" (1 Thess. 5:17), and here the word to pray does not mean to beg or to plead as if God were unwilling to give--but simply to expose by faith every situation as it arises, to the all-sufficiency of the One who indwells you by His life.
W. Ian Thomas
Since both the departed saints and we ourselves are in Christ, we share with them in the 'communion of saints.' They are still our brothers and sisters in Christ. When we celebrate the Eucharist they are there with us, along with the angels and archangels. Why then should we not pray for and with them? The reason the Reformers and their successors did their best to outlaw praying for the dead was because that had been so bound up with the notion of purgatory and the need to get people out of it as soon as possible. Once we rule out purgatory, I see no reason why we should not pray for and with the dead and every reason why we should - not that they will get out of purgatory but that they will be refreshed and filled with God's joy and peace. Love passes into prayer; we still love them; why not hold them, in that love, before God?
N.T. Wright
Divine justice pursued its course; disasters came thick on me: I was forced to pass through the valley of the shadow of death. His chastisements are mighty; and one smote me which has humbled me for ever. You know I was proud of my strength: but what is it now, when I must give it over to foreign guidance, as a child does its weakness? Of late, Jane - only - only of late - I began to see and acknowledge the hand of God in my doom. I began to experience remorse, repentance; the wish for reconcilement to my Maker. I began to pray: very brief prayers they were, but very sincere.
Charlotte Brontë
Even when she was speaking, her soul was in prayer reposing on an unseen support.
George Eliot
This I would like to be- braver and bolder, Just a bit wiser because I am older, Just a bit kinder to those I may meet, Just a bit manlier taking defeat; This for the New Year my wish and my plea- Lord, make a regular man out of me. This I would like to be- just a bit finer, More of a smiler and less of a whiner, Just a bit quicker to stretch out my hand Helping another who's struggling to stand, This is my prayer for the New Year to be, Lord, make a regular man out of me. This I would like to be- just a bit fairer, Just a bit better, and just a bit squarer, Not quite so ready to censure and blame, Quicker to help every man in the game, Not quite so eager men's failings to see, Lord, make a regular man out of me. This I would like to be- just a bit truer, Less of the wisher and more of the doer, Broader and bigger, more willing to give, Living and helping my neighbor to live! This for the New Year my prayer and my plea- Lord, make a regular man out of me.
Edgar A. Guest