Quotes by British Authors - Page 55

Imagination is a poor substitute for experience.
Havelock Ellis
The value of a sentiment is the amount of sacrifice you are prepared to make for it.
John Galsworthy
Saddle your dreams afore you ride 'em.
Mary Webb
Reason respects the differences and imagination the similitudes of things.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run though not to soar.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Imagination grows by exercise and contrary to common belief is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
W Somerset Maugham
Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.
Samuel Johnson
Ever let the Fancy roam Pleasure never is at home.
John Keats
Aspects are within us and who seems most kingly is king.
Thomas Hardy
Winston Churchill is always expecting rabbits to come out of an empty hat.
Field Marshall Lord Wavell
It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you for it was the illusion they loved.
W Somerset Maugham
Fools act on imagination without knowledge pedants act on knowledge without imagination.
Alfred North Whitehead
We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion if we want to be happy.
Cyril Connolly
Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.
Arthur Koestler
Ignorance never settles a question.
Benjamin Disraeli
Unprovided with original learning unformed in the habits of thinking unskilled in the arts of composition I resolved to write a book.
Edward Gibbon
Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.
Freya Stark
People think the Beatles know what's going on. We don't. We're just doing it.
John Lennon
When we are not sure we are alive.
Graham Greene
I know it was wonderful but I don't know how I did it.
Sir Laurence Olivier
My doctrine is this that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop and do nothing we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.
Anna Sewell
To some people the impossible is impossible.
Elizabeth Asquith Bibesco
Most of the basic truths of life sound absurd at first hearing.
Elizabeth Goudge
At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done then they begin to hope it can be done then they see it can be done-then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Truth can be outraged by silence quite as cruelly as by speech.
Amelia Barr
The empty vessel giveth a greater sound than the full barrel.
John Lyly
It is a blind goose that cometh to the fox's sermon.
John Lyly
Not ignorance but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.
Alfred North Whitehead
For Satan finds some mischief still For idle hands to do.
Isaac Watts
Idleness like kisses to be sweet must be stolen.
Jerome K. Jerome
Idleness is the holiday of fools.
Lord Chesterfield
Did nothing in particular and did it very well.
W.S. Gilbert
A physician can sometimes bury the scythe of death but he has no power over the sand in the hourglass.
Hester Lynch Thrale
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
Jerome K. Jerome
Big ideas are so hard to recognize so fragile so easy to kill. Don't forget that all of you who don't have them.
John Elliott
Any fool can be fussy and rid himself of energy all over the place but a man has to have something in him before he can settle down to do nothing.
J.B. Priestley
Who stole the livery of the court of Heaven To serve the Devil in.
Frederick Pollock
Hypocrites do the devil's drudgery in Christ's livery.
Matthew Henry
Ideas won't keep: something must be done about them.
Alfred North Whitehead
If anyone has a new idea in this country there are twice as many people who keep putting a man with a red flag in front of it.
Prince Philip
He that hath the name to be an early riser may sleep till noon.
James Howell
Saint abroad and a devil at home.
John Bunyan
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile - hoping it will eat him last.
Winston Churchill
No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.
Samuel Johnson
As the husband is the wife is.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
Samuel Butler
Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.
Aldous Huxley
Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.
Charles Lamb
Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.
Peter Ustinov
The great humorist forgets himself in his delighted contemplation of other people.
Douglas Bush
Caricature: putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.
Joseph Conrad
The teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth.
Charles Lamb
The total absence of humour from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
Alfred North Whitehead
Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
Virginia Woolf
I wanted to become an atheist but I gave it up. They have no holidays.
Henny Youngman
My wife is a sex object - every time I ask for sex she objects.
Les Dawson
I believe the first test of a truly great man is his humility.
John Ruskin
Our true nationality is mankind.
H.G.Wells
Life is livable because we know that wherever we go most of the people we meet will be restrained in their actions toward us by an almost instinctive network of taboos.
Havelock Ellis
Oh God! that bread should be so dear And flesh and blood so cheap!
Thomas Hood