Quotes by British Authors - Page 51

If you cannot inspire a woman with love of you fill her above the brim with love of herself all that runs over will be yours.
Charles Caleb Colton
In how many lives does Love really play a dominant part? The average taxpayer is no more capable of a 'grand passion' than of a grand opera.
Israel Zangwill
Happiness comes more from loving than being loved and often when our affection seems wounded it is only our vanity bleeding. To love and to be hurt often and to love again - this is the brave and happy life.
J. E. Buckrose
At the end of what is called the 'sexual life' the only love which has lasted is the love which has everything every disappointment every failure and every betrayal which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.
Graham Greene
When love and skill work together expect a masterpiece.
John Ruskin
Love lives on propinquity but dies on contact.
Thomas Hardy
People who throw kisses are hopelessly lazy.
Bob Hope
To live is like to love - all reason is against it and all healthy instinct for it.
Samuel Butler
What dire offence from am'rous causes springs. What mighty contests rise from trivial things.
Alexander Pope
I never married because there was no need. I have three pets at home that answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog that growls every morning a parrot that swears all afternoon and a cat that comes home late at night.
Marie Corelli
God help the man who won't marry until he finds a perfect woman and God help him still more if he finds her.
Ben Tillet
I do not spoil women. ... I don't send them flowers and gifts. . . . I'm saving those gestures until I am an unpleasant old man who must resort to bribery to win a woman's synthetic affections.
George Sanders
The great secret of a successful marriage is to treat all disasters as incidents and none of the incidents as disasters.
Harold Nicolson
He looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say "when."
P.G. Wodehouse
When I married Mr. Right I didn't know his first name was Always.
Anne Gilchrist
Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.
Joseph Conrad
A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.
Virginia Woolf
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust.
George Eliot
London is a roost for every bird.
Benjamin Disraeli
Logic is neither a science nor an art but a dodge.
Benjamin Jowett
Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.
Dean William R. Inge
A mighty mass of brick and smoke and shipping Dirty and dusty but as wide as eye Could reach with here and there a sail just skipping In sight then lost amidst the forestry Of masts a wilderness of steeples peeping On tiptoe through their sea-coal canopy A huge dun cupola like a fools-cap crown On a fool's head - and there is London Town.
Lord Byron
When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.
D.H. Lawrence
The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.
Aldous Huxley
A perfect judge will read each word of wit with the same spirit that its author writ.
Alexander Pope
One hears about life all the time from different people with very different narrative gifts.
Anthony Powell
Literature is mostly about sex and not much about having children and life is the other way around.
David Lodge
Published memoirs indicate the end of a man's activity and that he acknowledges the end.
George Meredith
What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student centuries afterwards who treasures it!
Helen Terry
I am never long even in the society of her I love without yearning for the company of my lamp and my library.
Lord Byron
A novel is a static thing that one moves through a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.
Kenneth Tynan
All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.
Richard Hughes
Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.
Walter Savage Landor
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be grasped at once.
Cyril Connolly
Those expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in the family.
Dr. Thomas Bowdler
Science is uneasy with beginnings. Mythology is concerned above all with what happened "in the beginning". Its signature is "Once upon a time".
Dudley Young
To be a good diarist one must have a little snouty sneaky mind.
Harold Nicolson
Oh! Let us never never doubt What nobody is sure about.
Hilaire Belloc
The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat with an indolent expression and an undulating throat like an unsuccessful literary man.
Hilaire Belloc
The lion is not so fierce as they paint him.
George Edward Herbert
It is not good to wake a sleeping lion.
Philip Sidney
Like will to like each creature loves his kind.
Robert Herrick
Do not waste time bothering whether you "love" your neighbor act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone you will presently come to love him.
C.S. Lewis
Let no one who loves be called unhappy. Even love unreturned has its rainbow.
J.M. Barrie
The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.
Arnold Toynbee
A little work a little play To keep us going - and so good-day!
George du Maurier
Simplicity clarity singleness: these are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy.
Richard Halloway
Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.
Clive James
It is a man's proper business to seek happiness and avoid misery.
John Locke
Remember that happiness is a way of travel not a destination.
Roy Goodman
Why should we refuse the happiness this hour gives us because some other hour might take it away?
John Oliver Hobbes
The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes but in liking what one does.
J.M. Barrie
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
Bertrand Russell
The secret of happiness is this: Let your interests be as wide as possible and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.
Bertrand Russell
It is not how much we have but how much we enjoy that makes happiness.
Charles Spurgeon
Nature intended you to be the fountain-spring of cheerfulness and social life and not the mountain of despair and melancholy.
Sir Arthur Helps
Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said "Let Newton be!" and all was light.
Alexander Pope
Lead kindly Light amid the encircling gloom Lead Thou me on! The night is dark and I am far from home - Lead Thou me on! Keep Thou my feet I do not ask to see The distant scene - one step enough for me.
John Henry Newman
The white flower of a blameless life.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous.
Margot Fonteyn