Quotes by British Authors - Page 633

Our minds, like our bodies, are in continual flux; something is hourly lost, and something acquired.
Samuel Johnson
... To be in time means to change.
C.S. Lewis
As long as [man] does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance... Wallow in it... Write a book about it; that is often an excellent way of sterilising the seeds which [Heavenly Father] plants in a human soul... Do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm [the cause of evil] if [it is kept] out of his will... The more often he feels without acting, the less he will ever be able to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.
C.S. Lewis
You'll find that more doors open if you approach them with an open heart rather than a closed mind.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Sometimes life-changing moments slip by unnoticed, their significance only becoming apparent in the light of subsequent events.
Alex George
We live in a society where those that do the greatest damage to humanity and nature reap the greatest financial rewards.
Steven Magee
The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more
D.H. Lawrence
Every change is a menace to stability.
Aldous Huxley
Everything, I thought, everything keeps changing. Changing shape, changing colour, changing sound.
Kevin Crossley-Holland
What is happening is something new in my life. I think many people have a sense of shape, of unfolding, in their lives. This sense makes it possible for them to say: Yes, this new person is important to me: he, or she, is the beginning of something I must live through. Or: This emotion, which I have not felt before, is not the alien I believed it to be. It will now be part of me and I must deal with it.It is easy now, looking back over my life to say: That Anna, in that time, was such and such a person. And then, five years later, she was such and such. A year, two years, five years of a certain kind of being can be rolled up and tucked away, or ‘named’ — yes, during that time I was like that. Well now I am in the middle of such a period, and when it is over I shall glance back at it casually and say: Yes, that’s what I was.
Doris Lessing
The light that filled my house was deep and livid, half magnolia, half rainwater. Things sat in it, dark and very still.
Helen Macdonald
[Tolstoy] denounced [many historians'] lamentable tendency to simplify. The experts stumble onto a battlefield, into a parliament or public square, and demand, "Where is he? Where is he?" "Where is who?" "The hero, of course! The leader, the creator, the great man!" And having found him, they promptly ignore all his peers and troops and advisors. They close their eyes and abstract their Napoleon from the mud and the smoke and the masses on either side, and marvel at how such a figure could possibly have prevailed in so many battles and commanded the destiny of an entire continent. "There was an eye to see in this man," wrote Thomas Carlyle about Napoleon in 1840, "a soul to dare and do. He rose naturally to be the King. All men saw that he was such."But Tolstoy saw differently. "Kings are the slaves of history," he declared. "The unconscious swarmlike life of mankind uses every moment of a king's life as an instrument for its purposes." Kings and commanders and presidents did not interest Tolstoy. History, his history, looks elsewhere: it is the study of infinitely incremental, imperceptible change from one state of being (peace) to another (war).The experts claimed that the decisions of exceptional men could explain all of history's great events. For the novelist, this belief was evidence of their failure to grasp the reality of an incremental change brought about by the multitude's infinitely small actions.
Daniel Tammet
But very few ordeals are redemptive and I doubt if the descent into hell teaches anything new. It can only hasten processes which are already in existence, and usually this just means that it degrades. You see, in hell one lacks the energy for any good change. This indeed is the meaning of hell.
Iris Murdoch
When you dream of change, it shines bright, like fire, and burns away all the rot that came before it. It's swift and inexorable. You cry for justice, and justice is done. The world stands with you in your fight. But if there was one thing I had learned in these last few weeks, it was that change had never been that simple. That kind of revolution existed only in daydreams.
Samantha Shannon
You have taught them to think differently. That is how we beat the bigotry. Class by class. Year by Year
E.R. Braithwaite
The creative personality is always one that looks on the world as fit for change and on himself as an instrument for change. Otherwise, what are you creating for? If the world is perfectly all right the way it is, you have no place in it. The creative personality thinks of the world as a canvas for change and of himself as a divine agent of change.
Jacob Bronowski
Change is the medium to become who you wish to be.
Steven Redhead
Things today ‘sure ain’t like they used to be’. They’ve changed, moved on, progressed.
Fennel Hudson
We cannot change or put right the past, it is our choice whether to be happy in this very moment. The present is all we have and problems only live in the past or the future.
Kate Skylark
I had changed, and gone on changing, but I did not fully remember how it had begun, or understand why.
Susan Hill
It's too late to change the world, but, hopefully it's not too late to change ourselves.
Anthony T.Hincks
Change, it seems, is inevitable. And so is compromise.
Fennel Hudson
If you think that climate change and global warming are hoaxes, then you are easily fooled.
Steven Magee
There are no electromagnetic field (EMF) book millionaires yet, but that may change with the roll out of the fifth generation (5G) wireless networks.
Steven Magee
In with the new, out with the old.’ That’s what we’re told. We have to change, adapt, compromise.
Fennel Hudson
We are in the process of finding out what filling billions of acres with electrified glass that emits electromagnetic intereference (EMI) does to the global environment.
Steven Magee
We are in the process of finding out what filling billions of acres with huge wind turbines does to the global environment.
Steven Magee
The human will be the only mammal in history to fully understand that its own self inflicted extinction is well underway.
Steven Magee
If you think that climate change and global warming are not going to affect you, then you are easily misled.
Steven Magee
If you're a square peg in a society full of round holes, it's time to change the playing board.
Anthony T.Hincks
Every physical response, every psychological change and every mental transformation starts with the mind.
David Amerland
That's old Twoflower, Rincewind thought. It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate beauty, he just appreciates it in his own way. I mean, if a poet sees a daffodil he stares at it and writes a long poem about it, but Twoflower wanders off to find a book on botany. He just looks at things, but nothing he looks at is ever the same again. Including me, I suspect.
Terry Pratchett
A positive is just two negatives going in two different directions. So, if something doesn't work, change tact, and come at it from a different direction. You never know, it may just work.That's being positive for ya!
Anthony T.Hincks
When you change your dress,you want to look your best.But when you change your lover,it's simply for another.
Anthony T.Hincks
No Goodbye'The floods of tears,Flow for thee,As I remember how it used to be.Your gentle touch,Your tender caress,Your scented perfume,Your tender kiss.But things do change,In the blink of an eye,An errant driver,No goodbyes.All I remember,Is how it was,Before that fatal night,When all was lost."I love you.
Anthony T.Hincks
If you're tired of triviality, maybe it's time you changed your life.
Anthony T.Hincks
If you want to change something, whether in a relationship, work, or anywhere, identify and focus on the few most important bits, and don't throw in extras to mess it up.
Jay Woodman
Everyone," Ross said, "seems a little less concerned than I do. Am I more tender-hearted for others or only tender because of my own conscience?""We are not–untender," she said. "Not so. But maybe we are more–resigned. When a man is condemned to death we accept it, though it's sad to do so. We know we cannot change it. You hoped to change it–so it's more of a–a disappointment. You feel you have failed. We don't feel that because we never hoped to succeed.
Winston Graham
I want to visit the snow in Antarctica before global warming turns it into a tropical paradise.
Steven Magee
Even the air seems to have a smell - earthy and rich and complicated, made out of things living nd things dying and things long dead. The smell of the world where nothing stops moving, nothing stays the same.
M.R. Carey
I felt like a Porsche that had learned it wasn't a bicycle anymore but was still taking part in bicycle races.
Neil Gaiman & Michael Reaves
The conversation soon turned upon fishing, and she heard Mr. Darcy invite him, with the greatest civility, to fish there as often as he chose while he continued in the neighbourhood, offering at the same time to supply him with fishing tackle, and pointing out those parts of the stream where there was usually most sport. Mrs. Gardiner, who was walking arm in arm with Elizabeth, gave her a look expressive of her wonder. Elizabeth said nothing, but it gratified her exceedingly; the compliment must be all for herself. Her astonishment, however, was extreme; and continually was she repeating, "Why is he so altered? From what can it proceed? It cannot be for me, it cannot be for my sake that his manners are thus softened. My reproofs at Hunsford could not work such a change as this. It is impossible that he should still love me.
Jane Austen
My interest in Sufism began when I was a college student. At the time, I was a rebellious young woman who liked to wrap several shawls of ‘-isms’ around her shoulders: I was a leftist, feminist, nihilist, environmentalist, anarcho-pacifist…I wasn’t interested in any religion and the difference between ‘religiosity’ and ‘spirituality’ was lost to me. Having spent some time of my childhood with a loving grandmother with many superstitions and beliefs, I had a sense the world was not composed of solely material things and there was more to life than I could see. But the truth is, I wasn’t interested in understanding the world. I only wanted to change it.
Elif Shafak
[W]e are not merely tempered and schooled by failure but compelled, in however subtle a fashion, to become something other than we were.
Anthony Lane
Sudden shifts and changes are no bad preparation for political life.
Charles Dickens
If we are ever going to achieve a rational approach to organizing our affairs, we have to dignify the process of admitting to being wrong. It doesn't help matters at all if the media, or your friends, accuse you of "flip-flopping" when you change your mind. Changing our minds is our hope for the future.
Brian Eno
Something else emerges from this discussion about us as human individuals: we're not fixed, stable intellects riding along peering at the world through the lenses of our eyes like the pilots of people-shaped spacecraft. We are affected constantly by what's going on around us. Whether our flexibility is based in neuroplasticity or in less dramatic aspects of the brain, we have to start acknowledging that we are mutable, persuadable and vulnerable to clever distortions, and that very often what we want to be is a matter of constant effort rather than attaining a given state and then forgetting about it. Being human isn't like hanging your hat on a hook and leaving it there, it's like walking in a high wind: you have to keep paying attention. You have to be engaged with the world.
Nick Harkaway
From the Buddhist perspective, the only lasting way to bring about change is for people themselves to change.
Pat Allwright
There no such thing as something! Why? Because everything's already turning into something else!
David Mitchell
Our second danger is to associate tradition with the immovable; to think of it as something hostile to all change; to aim to return to some previous condition which we imagine as having been capable of preservation in perpetuity, instead of aiming to stimulate the life which produced that condition in its time. . . . a tradition without intelligence is not worth having . . .
T.S Eliot
It was the challenge of life too, was it not? People could never be fully understood. They were ever changing, different people at different times and under different circumstances and influences. And always growing, always creating themselves anew.How impossible it was to know another human being.How impossible to know even oneself.
Mary Balogh
The twin guardian angels whose eyes and hands and wings had focused protective attention on the souls that lay there no longer faced each other. They stared blindly into a random middle distance. The scroll they held between them proclaiming eternal resurrection was broken in two.
Clare Morgan
It's only after the change is fully formed that you can see what's happened.
Sebastian Faulks
Life had called his name, and without thinking, he had stepped forward. He wondered if perhaps he was becoming the person he had always wanted to be.
Simon Van Booy
There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.
Theodore Dalrymple
HARRINGTON: And God hears your prayer, doesn't he? We hear Joy's getting better....LEWIS: That's not why I pray, Harry. I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God, it changes me.
William Nicholson
Not only are poor, unemployed, less will-educated and non-white people more likely to become depressed, but they are also least likely to benefit from treatment by either antidepressants or psychotherapy. That is why combating depression requires more than merely providing effective treatment for those who are already suffering from it. We also need the change the social conditions - such a racism, unemployment, poverty, unaffordable housing, and lack of adequate education - that put people at increased risk of becoming depressed.
Irving Kirsch
I think maybe Hell is a place. But you don't have to stay anywhere forever.
Neil Gaiman
If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that.But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.
Tom Stoppard
Twenty years is, after all, a long time. We are not the same people we were. Old friends, lovers, even family members: they are strangers who happen to wear a familiar face. We have no right to claim to know anyone after such a distance.
Graham Joyce