Quotes by British Authors - Page 613

He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity--suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.
Alain de Botton
The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.
W.H. Auden
Genius is independent of situation.
Charles Churchill
Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.
Christopher Isherwood
The powers of a man's mind are directly proportioned to the quantity of coffee he drinks.
James Mackintosh
Intelligence is composed mostly of imagination, insight, things that have nothing to do with reason.
Vivienne Westwood
He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor.
Alain de Botton
Do you know, André, I sometimes think that you have no heart.' 'Presumably because I sometimes betray intelligence.
Rafael Sabatini
What they might lack in intelligence, they make up for with sheer quantities of high explosive.
Simon Morden
Show Holmes a drop of water and he would deduce the existence of the Atlantic. Show it to me and I would look for a tap. That was the difference between us.
Anthony Horowitz
A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.
Aldous Huxley
The willingness to change one’s mind in the light of new evidence is a sign of rationality not weakness.
Stuart Sutherland
Pooh hasn't much Brain, but he never comes to any harm. He does silly things and they turn out right. There's Owl. Owl hasn't exactly got Brain, but he Knows Things. He would know the Right Thing to Do when Surrounded by Water. There's Rabbit. He hasn't Learnt in Books, but he can always Think of a Clever Plan. There's Kanga. She isn't Clever, Kanga isn't, but she would be so anxious about Roo that she would do a Good Thing to Do without thinking about it. And then there's Eeyore. And Eeyore is so miserable anyhow that he wouldn't mind about this.
A.A. Milne
Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l'admire.A fool always finds a greater fool to admire him.
Arthur Conan Doyle
A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences seems to me reckless to the point of insanity.
Dorothy L. Sayers
It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.
G H Hardy
The key then to attaining this higher level of intelligence is to make our years of study qualitatively rich. We don't simply absorb information - we internalize it and make it our own by finding some way to put this knowledge to practical use.
Robert Greene
Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.
Jane Austen
The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mindabout nothing -- to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.
John Keats
One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly was so—but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence, the act. He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous.
Douglas Adams
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
Arthur C. Clarke
Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.
Jane Austen
I make mistakes like the next man. In fact, being--forgive me--rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.
J.K. Rowling
A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
Bertrand Russell
Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.
Aldous Huxley
A dozen more questions occurred to me. Not to mention twenty-two possible solutions to each one, sixteen resulting hypotheses and counter-theorems, eight abstract speculations, a quadrilateral equation, two axioms, and a limerick. That's raw intelligence for you.
Jonathan Stroud
I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.
Douglas Adams
The fires of hell were seventy times hotter than the fires of the iron.
Ruth Ahmed
When we are angry, when we are excited, when we are depressed, when we are elated, we are completely submerged in and identified with those thoughts and feelings. This is why we suffer. We suffer because we are completely identified with our thoughts and feelings and we think this is me. This is who I am.
Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
Ultimately, there is light and love and intelligence in this universe. And we are it, we carry that within us, its not just something out there, it is within us and this is what we are trying to re-connect with, our original light and love and intelligence.
Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
There's three different kinds of Christian," said Cash. "There's preaching Christians, church-playing Christians, and then there's practicing Christian. I'm trying very hard to be a practicing Christian.
Steve Turner
Love it will not betray you, dismay or enslave you. It will set your free.
Mumford and Sons
Of the things that followed I cannot say at all whether they were what men call dream. And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.
C.S. Lewis
I could mend my soul no more than my face. Unless the gods helped. And why did the gods not help?
C.S. Lewis
We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.
C.S. Lewis
How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
C.S. Lewis
Are the gods not just?' 'Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?
C.S. Lewis
It is the gods who have been accused. They have answered her. If they in turn accuse her, a greater judge and a more excellent court must try the case.
C.S. Lewis
You're a tree in whose shadow we can't thrive. We want to be our own.
C.S. Lewis
We'd rather they were ours and dead than yours and made immortal.
C.S. Lewis
Once you have made the world an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing.
C.S. Lewis
He cannot ravish. He can only woo.
C.S. Lewis
We want the Church to be small not only that fewer men may know the Enemy but also that those who do may acquire the uneasy intensity and the defensive self-righteousness of a secret society or a clique.
C.S. Lewis
Some ages are lukewarm and complacent, and then it is our business to soothe them yet faster asleep. Other ages, of which the present is one, are unbalanced and prone to faction, and it is our business to inflame them.
C.S. Lewis
Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy's ground...All the same, it is His invention, not ours...All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden...An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula.
C.S. Lewis
As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance.
C.S. Lewis
The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents--or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall.
C.S. Lewis
Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied.
C.S. Lewis
The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels.
C.S. Lewis
He's a hedonist at heart. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a façade. Or only like foam on the seashore. Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure. He makes no secret of it... He has a bourgeois mind. He has filled His world full of pleasures.
C.S. Lewis
No man will love you, though you gave your life for him, unless you have a pretty face. So (might it not be?), the gods will not love you (however you try to pleasure them, and whatever you suffer) unless you have that beauty of soul. In either race. for the love of men or the love of a god, the winners and losers are marked out from birth. We bring our ugliness, in both kinds, with us into the world, with it our destiny.
C.S. Lewis
Even of his sins the Enemy does not want him to think too much: once they are repented, the sooner the man turns his attention outward, the better the Enemy is pleased.
C.S. Lewis
Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper throughs than anyone else.
C.S. Lewis
...true wisdom is the skill and practice of death.
C.S. Lewis
And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another.
C.S. Lewis
The only way to know God, the only way to know the other, is to listen. Listening is reaching out into that unknown other self, surmounting your walls and theirs; listening is the beginning of understanding, the first exercise of
Tony Hendra
You no longer speak of your old friends, your Council, your home. I fear that you are forgetting them, and forgetting your reason for coming here.”Hunter sighed. “It’s difficult to talk about them, they don’t belong here. Anyway, I thought you wanted me to give up my old life. Congratulations, you’ve won.”The Abate smiled sadly. “Perhaps I did, I wanted you to abandon your violent past and adopt our ways. But I see that you are giving up everything and taking on nothing. What are you afraid of George?
K.S. Marsden
Believing is not thinking something is true, Shireen. It is acting for the truth.
Ian Baucom
Believing, too, that is not enough. You cannot just believe. Your belief must have a purpose.
Ian Baucom
Sometimes you just have to turn off the lights, sit in the dark, and see what happens inside of you.
Adam Oakley