Quotes by British Authors - Page 517

Your will shall decide your destiny.
Charlotte Brontë
Destiny is a worrying concept. I don't want to be fated, I want to choose.
Jeanette Winterson
the buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated.
Jeanette Winterson
It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.
W Somerset Maugham
You speak of destiny as if it was fixed.
Philip Pullman
We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not, or die of despair.
Philip Pullman
Coincidences mean you're on the right path.
Simon Van Booy
I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.
Salman Rushdie
If you cannot do great things in life, make sure you do the small things in a great way.
Habeeb Akande
Enlightenment is not about cocooning one’s self, but about integrating more fully with both your self and life.
Jay Woodman
Naive people always trying to blame others for their constant heartbreak & failed relationships instead of looking in the mirror & re-evaluating themselves. It's YOU that needs to change.
David Reeves
Achievement of any kind is the crown of effort,the diadem of thought.By the aid of self-control, resolution, purity, righteousness, and well-directed thought a man ascends.By the aid of animality,indolence,impurity,corruption,and confusion of thought a man descends.
James Allen
Self-improvement comes mainly from trying to help others.
John Templeton
A touch less ego and dash more humility will improve the quality of anything you turn your hand to.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Speak as educated nature suggests to you, and you will do well, but let it be educated and not raw, rude, uncultivated nature. Demosthenes took unbounded pains with his voice, and Cicero, who was naturally weak, made a long journey into Greece to correct his manner of speaking. With far nobler themes, let us not be less ambitious to excel.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Self-pitying, self-righteous, self-important, all the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she always needed the most.
David Nicholls
Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think about these things in a new way. The change is as decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is what is so hard to establish. Once the new way of thinking has been established, the old problems vanish; indeed they become hard to recapture. For they go with our way of expressing ourselves and, if we clothe ourselves in a new form of expression, the old problems are discarded along with the old garment.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Everybody has somebody. It could be a friend, a lover, a spouse, a writing partner, or even That One Person You See At The Coffee Shop each day. Sometimes they exist to comfort you. Sometimes they exist to drive you absolutely mad. Be open to either as a form of self-improvement.
Terry Pratchett
In the long run most short cuts are flawed - especially on journeys to 'so-called' success
Rasheed Ogunlaru
If you feel that you are going without go within
Rasheed Ogunlaru
If people who are in a difficulty will only do the first little reasonable thing which they can clearly recognize as reasonable, they will always find the next step more easy both to see and take.
Samuel Butler
Once a day....call yourselves to an account what new ideas, what new proposition or truth you have gained, what further confirmation of known truths, and what advances you have made in any part of knowledge.
Isaac Watts
Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility, or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law, or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self-improvement.
J.K. Rowling
the only source whence any thing like consolation or composure could be drawn, was in the resolution of her own better conduct, and the hope that, however inferior in spirit and gaiety might be the following and every future winter of her life to the past, it would yet find her more rational, more acquainted with herself, and leave her less to regret when it were gone.
Jane Austen
With each encounter, we leave a part of ourselves
Mimi Novic
...but doth not the person who expends vast sums in the furniture of his house or the ornaments of his person, who consumes much time and employs great pains in dressing himself, or who thinks himself paid for self-denial, labour, or even villany, by a title or a ribbon, sacrifice as much to vanity as the poor wit who is desirous to read you his poem or his play?
Henry Fielding
My body is not a temple. It’s a skip,
Jolie Booth
Everyday, you get home from the shops with a bag of cat food and bin-liners and realise that, yet again, you failed to have cosmetic surgery, book a cheap weekend in Paris, change your name to something more glamorous, buy the fifth series of The Sopranos, divorce your spouse, sell up and move to Devon, or adopt a child from Guatemala.
Lynne Truss
The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive.
C.S. Lewis
Resolution number one: Obviously will lose twenty pounds. Number two: Always put last night's panties in the laundry basket. Equally important, will find sensible boyfriend to go out with and not continue to form romantic attachments to any of the following: alcoholics, workaholics, commitment phobic's, peeping toms, megalomaniacs, emotional fuckwits or perverts. And especially will not fantasize about a particular person who embodies all these things
Helen Fielding
All we are not stares back at what we are.
W.H. Auden
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
Aldous Huxley
A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
C.S. Lewis
Things were good. He had things to look forward to. That, for now, was to be his definition of living - to always have a thing to look forward to.
Kevin Sampson
It seems to me that we do live in two worlds... there is this physical one, which is coherant, and there is the spiritual one, which to the average man with his flashes of religious experience, is very often incoherant. This experience of having two worlds to live in all the time, or not all the time, is a vital one, and is what living is like.
William Golding
Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face - the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man - all present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us - we have died - what is there to be afraid of?It answers them: But that happened so gradually, so easily. I'm afraid of being rushed.
Christopher Isherwood
If you are not careful you will end up living the illusions that others have created for you.
Steven Redhead
Start living by taking back the control of your life now! Create a life more in tune with your true desires.
Steven Redhead
Don't become a prisoner of your own reality, set yourself free by creating a life worth living.
Steven Redhead
Don't put down too many roots in terms of a domicile. I have lived in four countries and I think my life as a writer and our family's life have been enriched by this. I think a writer has to experience new environments. There is that adage: No man can really succeed if he doesn't move away from where he was born. I believe it is particularly true for the writer.
Arthur Hailey
Stop complaining and start living.
Habeeb Akande
Legacy is not what's left tomorrow when you're gone. It's what you give, create, impact and contribute today while you're here that then happens to live on.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
You can't become a decent horseman until you fall off and get up again, a good number of times. There's life in a nutshell.
Bear Grylls
This would have once been a place for contemplation. He looked up at the towers surrounding him. Many of the dead bodies had been removed. Their places had been taken by the living.
Rupert Thomson
I don't know it is that I always feel that other people can create things but that I can't. I imagine it's simpler living in remote tribes or communities where one is obliged to have a go or else you have to do without. I suppose it is fear of failure in an age where political correctness is trying to erase the word 'failure' from the language. It's OK to fail isn't it, but only if you've tried? What is so bizarre is that when one does try, one rarely falls short. Obviously some people do things better than others but if it gives you pleasure, then so what? As my grandmother used to say, 'patience and perseverance made a bishop of his reverence!' So don't say you can't make candles or soap or that you can't spin or weave until you've tried it. As for mending, well, if you're not throwing everything away, then you have no option but to make do and mend. After all, the only way to get rid of shopping malls and supermarkets with their food miles is for people not to shop in those places and the way to cure this mercenary mercantile world is to make your own things.
Clarissa Dickson Wright
Green and living jewels drip into my eyes" from the poem "All Green and Living Things" in the book "Terra Affirmative
Jay Woodman
In every living thing there is the desire for love.
D.H. Lawrence
You're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change.
Neil Gaiman
There seemed to be endless obstacles preventing me from living with my eyes open, but as I gradually followed up clue after clue it seemed that the root cause of them all was fear.
Joanna Field
All human activity is prompted by desire.
Bertrand Russell
I'm happily married to Peter senior; we're best friends as well as lovers, which is probably the best recipe for a successful relationship. We live in a lovely part of England.
Carole Mortimer
Rest and peace should not be left until you're deceased. They are two vital life incredients everybody needs and seeks.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
There is so much trouble in coming into the world, and so much more, as well as meanness, in going out of it, that 'tis hardly worth while to be here at all.
Viscount Henry St. John Bolingbroke
The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live.
Jeanette Winterson
Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By most astounding stroke of luck and infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist.For endless eons there was no you. Before you know it, you will cease to be again. And in between you have this wonderful opportunity to see and feel and think and do. Whatever else you do with your life, nothing will remotely compare with the incredible accomplishment of having managed to get yourself born. Congratulations. Well done. You really are special.
Bill Bryson
He thought he’d lived through everything. Only now did he realise he’d merely existed.
Dianna Hardy
[i]We were fighting so very hard and achieving so very little aside from staying alive. BUT THAT’S EVERYTHING, my father wrote to me, when I told him that in a letter.[/i]
Helen Oyeyemi
One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it's prepared to put up with living.
Douglas Adams
Staying alive was what we did to pass the time.
Meg Rosoff
Every year I live I am more convinced that the waste of life lies in the love we have not given, the powers we have not used, the selfish prudence that will risk nothing, and which shirking pain, misses happiness as well. No one ever yet was the poorer in the long run for having once in a lifetime ‘let out all the length of the reins.
Mary Cholmondeley