Quotes by British Authors - Page 60

Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought. Our brightest blazes are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.
Samuel Johnson
For attractive lips speak words of kindness. For lovely eyes seek out the good in people. For a slim figure share your food with the hungry. For beautiful hair let a child run his or her fingers through it once a day. For poise walk with the knowledge you'll never walk alone.
Audrey Hepburn
Though language forms the preacher 'Tis "good works" make the man.
Eliza Cook
The happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except that they are so.
William Ralph Inge
It is those who have a deep and real inner life who are best able to deal with the irritating details of outer life.
Evelyn Underhill
Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply to enjoy simply to think freely to risk life to be needed.
Storm Jameson
We can build upon foundations anywhere if they are well and truly laid.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
For me happiness came from prayer to a kindly God faith in a kindly God love for my fellow man and doing the very best I could every day of my life. I had looked for happiness in fast living but it was not there. I tried to find it in money but it was not there either. But when I placed myself in tune with what I believe to be fundamental truths of life when I began to develop my limited ability to rid my mind of all kinds of tangled thoughts and fill it with zeal and courage and love when I gave myself a chance by treating myself decently and sensibly I began to feel the stimulating warm glow of happiness.
Edward Young
The best philosophy is to do one's duties to take the world as it comes submit respectfully to one's lot and bless the goodness that has given us so much happiness with it whatever it is.
Horace Walpole
Let your boat of life be light packed only with what you need-a homely home and simple pleasures one or two friends worth the name someone to love and to love you a cat a dog enough to eat and enough to wear and a little more than enough to drink for thirst is a dangerous thing.
Jerome K. Jerome
To do the useful thing to say the courageous thing to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.
T.S Eliot
Build a little fence of trust Around today Fill the space with loving work And therein stay.
Mary Frances Butts
If a man has important work and enough leisure and income to enable him to do it properly he is in possession of as much happiness as is good for any of the children of Adam.
R.H. Tawney
The secret of happiness ... is to be in harmony with existence to be always calm always lucid always willing "to be joined to the universe without being more conscious of it than an idiot " to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.
Cyril Connolly
When I have been unhappy I have heard an opera ... and it seemed the shrieking of winds when I am happy a sparrow's chirp is delicious to me. But it is not the chirp that makes me happy but I that make it sweet.
John Ruskin
To be obliged to beg our daily happiness from others bespeaks a more lamentable poverty than that of him who begs his daily bread.
Charles Caleb Colton
Happiness happiness ... the flavor is with you-with you alone and you can make it as intoxicating as you please.
Joseph Conrad
The test of enjoyment is the remembrance which it leaves behind.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Mirth is better than fun and happiness is better than mirth.
William Blake
Amusement is the happiness of those who cannot think.
Alexander Pope
False happiness is like false money it passes for a long time as well as the true and serves some ordinary occasions but when it is brought to the touch we find the lightness and alloy and feel the loss.
Alexander Pope
Happiness ... leads none of us by the same route.
Charles Caleb Colton
Your readiest desire is your path to joy ... even if it destroys you.
Holbrook Jackson
Beauty is a radiance that originates from within and comes from inner security and strong character.
Jane Seymour
What is it that love does to a woman? Without it she only sleeps with it alone she lives.
Ouida
Love is the only effective counter to death.
Maureen Duffy
The true object of all human life is play.
G.K. Chesterton
We can sometimes love what we do not understand but it is impossible completely to understand what we do not love.
Anna Jameson
Perhaps the best function of parenthood is to teach the young creature to love with safety so that it may be able to venture unafraid when later emotion comes the thwarting of the instinct to love is the root of all sorrow and not sex only but divinity itself is insulted when it is repressed. To disapprove to condemn-the human soul shrivels under barren righteousness.
Freya Stark
All animals except man know that the principle business of life is to enjoy it.
Samuel Butler
Live all you can it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?
Henry James
It is nonsense to speak of 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures. To a hungry man it is rightly more important that he eat than that he philosophize.
W.H. Auden
I have known some quite good people who were unhappy but never an interested person who was unhappy.
A.C. Benson
The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes but in liking what one has to do.
James M. Barrie
New Year's Day is every man's birthday.
Charles Lamb
The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.
Jeremy Bentham
Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived.
Lytton Strachey
Happiness is a mystery like religion and it should never be rationalized.
G.K. Chesterton
They're hangin' Danny Deever in the morning!
Rudyard Kipling
The despotism of custom is everywhere standing up to human advancement.
John Stuart Mill
The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything - or nothing.
Lady Astor
Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
W Somerset Maugham
Tradition does not mean that the living are dead it means that the dead are living.
Harold Macmillan
The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.
Samuel Johnson
A precedent embalms a principle.
Benjamin Disraeli
He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice.
John Stuart Mill
It is well to lie fallow for a while.
Martin F. Tupper
In some remote regions of Islam it is said a woman caught unveiled by a stranger will raise her skirt to cover her face.
Raymond Mortimer
On what strange stuff Ambition feeds!
Eliza Cook
The only cure for grief is action.
G. H. Lewes
Greed like the love of comfort is a kind of fear.
Cyril Connolly
None think the great unhappy but the great.
Edward Young
Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth! Immortal though no more though fallen great!
Lord Byron
No man ever yet became great by imitation.
Samuel Johnson
Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
T.S Eliot
If I am a great man then a good many of the great men of history are frauds.
Bonar Law
Not a day passes over the earth but men and women of no note do great deeds speak great words and suffer noble sorrows.
Charles Reade
The world knows nothing of its greatest men.
Henry Taylor
The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.
Max Beerbohm
Born of the sun they travelled a short while towards the sun And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
Stephen Spender