Quotes by British Authors - Page 680

Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.
Bertrand Russell
You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home -- all the more powerful because forbidden -- terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.
Winston S. Churchill
The best thing—in Shadow's opinion, perhaps the only good thing—about being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that he'd plunged as low as he could plunge and he'd hit bottom. He didn't worry that the man was going to get him, because the man had got him. He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it.
Neil Gaiman
Fear is a strange soil. It grows obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.
Terry Pratchett
But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him the horror was that he might also be wrong.
George Orwell
We have nothing to fear but fear itself," Otto replied. "Oh, and a megalomaniacal headmaster, the world's deadliets assassin, giant mutated plant monsters, an international cartel of supervillains, and the security forces of every country on earth, but other than that...just fear.
Mark Walden
Could be. I’m a pretty dangerous dude when I’m cornered.”“Yeah,” said the voice from under the table, “you go to pieces so fast people get hit by the shrapnel.
Douglas Adams
Being terrified but going ahead and doing what must be done—that's courage. The one who feels no fear is a fool, and the one who lets fear rule him is a coward.
Piers Anthony
Coraline shivered. She preferred her other mother to have a location: if she were nowhere, then she could be anywhere. And, after all, it is always easier to be afraid of something you cannot see.
Neil Gaiman
Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.
C.S. Lewis
Boredom is a pleasing antidote for fear
Daphne du Maurier
Sometimes they threaten you with something - something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, "Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to So-and-so." And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself, and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You WANT it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care is yourself.
George Orwell
Some men are too dull to feel what might happen. Others torture themselves with maybes and populate their dreams with horrors more terrible than their worst enemy could inflict upon them.
Mark Lawrence
Life is made of fear. Some people eat fear soup three times a day. Some people eat fear soup all the meals there are. I eat it sometimes. When they bring me fear soup to eat, I try not to eat it, I try to send it back. But sometimes I'm too afraid to and have to eat it anyway.
Martin Amis
I’ll tell you now. That silence almost beat me. It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears. The spirits of the dead have nothing on it. The dead one tried to show me hell, but it was a pale imitation of the horror I can paint on the darkness in a quiet moment.
Mark Lawrence
Cowards make the best torturers. Cowards understand fear and they can use it.
Mark Lawrence
Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears.
Rudyard Kipling
Do I dare Disturb the universe?
T.S Eliot
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.
C.S. Lewis
Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
Bertrand Russell
We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic - now mercifully stilled, thank God - might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion as it had before.
Daphne du Maurier
Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.
Samuel Johnson
Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren't.
Neil Gaiman
What you fear most of all is —fear. Very wise...
J.K. Rowling
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Bertrand Russell
Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.
Julian Barnes
Fear isn't so difficult to understand. After all, weren't we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf. What frightens us today is exactly the same sort of thing that frightened us yesterday. It's just a different wolf. This fright complex is rooted in every individual.
Alfred Hitchcock
A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it.
J.R.R. Tolkien
There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.
Jane Austen
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
C.S. Lewis
Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.
J.K. Rowling
What do you fear, lady?" [Aragorn] asked. "A cage," [Éowyn] said. "To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.
J.R.R. Tolkien
The sea is as desolate and barren as it is fertile and life-giving. It is cold and dismal, yet bold and spirited. Sometimes imperious and conquering, other times gentle and meek. But it is always mysterious. Those mysteries hold many secrets. One has but to listen and watch to discover them
Jocelyn Murray
More and more I am learning to let go of urgency and to let my soul sink deeply and refreshingly into contemplation of the joy of the Spirit.
Helen Greaves
...all that we do is governed by the law of opposites in which every so-called positive act is exactly and equally balanced by its opposite.
Tony Parsons
That's what his stare has been saying to me all this time: 'At least I galloped - when did you?
Peter Shaffer
Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him and not another's. All that you are, sins apart, is destined, if you will let God have His good way, to utter satisfaction. The Brocken spectre 'looked to every man like his first love', because she was a cheat. But God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it--made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand
C.S. Lewis
...if thou art persuaded that God is true, why dost thou doubt of his promises?—and if thou believest that God is beauty and perfection itself, why dost not thou make him alone the chief end of all thine affections and desires? for if thou lovest beauty, he is most fair; if thou desirest riches, he is most wealthy; if thou seekest wisdom, he is most wise. Whatsoever excellency thou hast seen in any creature, it is nothing but a sparkle of that which is in infinite perfection in God...
Lewis Bayly
With a burning ambition, sustained focus, and daily action - there simply are no limits to what you will achieve.
Curtis Rivers
The real winners I've met in life weren't necessarily skilled or perfect. They just had the tenacity to never, ever give up.
Curtis Rivers
Your hopes and dreams are like a giant helium balloon, tugging on your hand to take you above the clouds, to that quiet place of peace and contentment. All you have to do is stop resisting, to let go - and ALLOW your hopes and dreams to take you there.
Curtis Rivers
Scientists have an expression for hypotheses that are utterly useless even for learning from mistakes. They refer to them as being "not even wrong." Most so-called spiritual discourse is of this type.
Christopher Hitchens
As long as he retains externally the habits of a Christian he can still be made to think of himself as one who has adopted a few new friends and amusements but whose spiritual state is much the same...And while he thinks that, we do not have to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognised, sin, but only with his vague, though uneasy, feeling that he hasn’t been doing very well lately. This dim uneasiness needs careful handling. If it gets too strong it may wake him up...if you suppress it entirely...we lose an element in the situation which can be turned to good account. If such a feeling is allowed to live, but not allowed to become irresistible and flower into real repentance, it has one invaluable tendency. It increases the patient’s reluctance to think about the Enemy. All humans at nearly all times have some such reluctance; but when thinking of Him involves facing and intensifying a whole vague cloud of half-conscious guilt, this reluctance is increased tenfold...In this state your patient will not omit, but he will increasingly dislike, his religious duties...He will want his prayers to be unreal, for he will dread nothing so much as effective contact with the Enemy.
C.S. Lewis
What I think is true is that at a certain stage in his life, he deliberately ceased to take any interest in himself except as a kind of spiritual alumnus taking his moral finals...Self-knowledge for him had come to mean recognition of his own weakness and shortcomings and nothing more. Anything beyond that he sharply suspected, both in himself and in others, as a symptom of spiritual megalomania. At best, there was so much else, in letters and in life, that he found much more interesting than himself.
Jocelyn Gibb
What I think is true is that at a certain stage in his life he deliberately ceased to take any interest in himself except as a kind of spiritual alumnus taking his moral finals...Self-knowledge for him had come to mean recognition of his own weakness and shortcomings and nothing more. Anything beyond that he sharply suspected, both in himself and in others, as a symptom of spiritual megalomania. At best, there was so much else, in letters and in life, that he found much more interesting! As far as I am able to judge, it was this that lay behind that distinctive combination of an almost supreme intellectual and 'phantastic' maturity, laced with moral energy, on the one hand, with...a certain psychic or spiritual immaturity on the other
Jocelyn Gibb
Your spirituality is simply the positive, loving side of yourself, the energy of joy and togetherness. It's the feeling you have when your dog bounds up wagging its tail, or the biggest laugh you have with your best friend. Or that feeling in a concert when sixty thousand people sing along in unison to a song you love, or the moment when you are looking into the eyes of someone you love, or when you feel at your most confident and happy, as if you can do anything. It is all the most positive aspects of our existence. In short, it is love.
Matthew Todd
I would make it a rule to eradicate from my patient any strong personal taste which is not actually a sin, even if it is something quite trivial such as a fondness for county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa. Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue in them; but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them which I distrust. The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the “best” people, the “right” food, the “important” books.
C.S. Lewis
What I think is true is that at a certain stage in his life, he deliberately ceased to take any interest in himself except for a kind of spiritual alumnus taking his moral finals...Self-knowledge for him had come to mean recognition of his own weakness and shortcomings and nothing more. Anything beyond that he sharply suspected, both in himself and in others, as a symptom of spiritual megalomania. At best, there was so much else, in letters and in life, that he found much more interesting than himself.
Jocelyn Gibb
There is the inner life, which is the world of final reality, the world of memory, emotion, imagination, intelligence, and natural common sense, and which goes on all the time like the heartbeat. There is also the thinking process by which we break into that inner life and capture answers and evidence to support the answers out of it. That process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn and if we do not somehow learn it, then our minds lie in us like the fish in the pond of a man who cannot fish.
Ted Hughes
To live without awareness is to live as the deaf, blind, and dumb in a world of vibrant light and sound.
Belsebuub
The more you condemn yourself for thinking or feeling a certain way, the more you feel stuck within your own body and mind.. What if you went the other way and embraced it so totally that it was as if there was never any alternative experience to be reached for? What happens when the conflict ends?
Adam Oakley
What you have within you in your life is what you are after death. If you have explored it to some extent, you would see how life continues after death, and know that after death the consequences of the way that you have lived follow.
Belsebuub
Consciousness cannot be glimpsed as though it were something outside yourself, because it is you.
Belsebuub
Dreams are an insight into our psychology: they are what we are, but stripped of the conventions and norms of psychology, and the rules of the physical world…
Belsebuub
Being in the present moment, one can step outside the mechanical train of life, and this is where the inner revolution begins.
Belsebuub
The spiritual work builds upon awareness, increases consciousness, transforms it, merges it with the divine, and this is how to reach true spirituality in life.
Belsebuub
For spiritual change, we need to see and understand ourselves. What sees is consciousness, it is what perceives, and is essentially what we are. To understand ourselves we need to look within and study how we think and feel, and doing that is called self-observation.
Belsebuub
There’s a huge difference between reading about out-of-body experiences or watching videos about them and lifting out of your body and traveling through space in a different dimension. Why not experience a greater multidimensional reality rather than just reading about it? Discover what science doesn’t know and cannot ever know – it’s your life and you have a choice to break free of the known and live in a different way.
Belsebuub
An idea of awakening is not awakening. It’s simply an idea. It’s not the real thing. The real thing happens in our lives.
Belsebuub
It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man's use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it.
John Stuart Mill