Quotes by British Authors - Page 72

If we insist on being as sure as is conceivable ... we must be content to creep along the ground and can never soar.
John Henry Cardinal Newman
There lives more faith in honest doubt Believe me than in half the creeds
Lord Alfred Tennyson
Nothing perhaps is strange once you have accepted life itself the great strange business which includes all lesser strangeness.
Rose Macaulay
I agree with Agassiz that dogs possess something very like a conscience.
Charles Darwin
When in doubt win the trick.
Edmund Hoyle
Fox-terriers are born with about four times as much original sin in them as other dogs.
Jerome K. Jerome
Orthodoxy my Lord said Bishop Warburton in a whisper - "orthodoxy is my doxy - heterodoxy is another man's doxy."
Joseph Priestley
Of that there is no manner of doubt - No probable possible shadow of doubt - No possible doubt whatever.
W.S. Gilbert
I was born to other things.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
Men would be angels Angels would be gods.
Alexander Pope
Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.
Samuel Johnson
Self-denial is painful for a moment but very agreeable in the end.
Jane Taylor
The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour whatever he does whoever he is.
C.S. Lewis
The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.
Iris Murdoch
No emergency excuses you from exercising tolerance.
Phyllis Bottome
The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.
H.G.Wells
Sometimes I found that in my happy moments I could not believe that I had ever been miserable.
Joanna Field
What we call the beginning is often an end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
T.S Eliot
I feel successful when the writing goes well. This lasts five minutes. Once when I was number one on the bestseller list I also felt successful. That lasted three minutes.
Jacqueline Briskin
We are but as the instrument of Heaven. Our work is not design but destiny.
Owen Meredith
Despair is the conclusion of fools.
Benjamin Disraeli
Our desires always increase with our possessions. The knowledge that something remains yet unenjoyed impairs our enjoyment of the good before us.
Samuel Johnson
Democracy means government by the uneducated while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
G.K. Chesterton
It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Winston Churchill
Demagogues and agitators are very unpleasant but they are incidents to a free and constitutional country and you must put up with these inconveniences or do without many important advantages.
Benjamin Disraeli
Who apart From ourselves can see any difference between Our victories and our defeats?
Christopher Fry
Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well.
Lord Chesterfield
Defeat should never be a source of discouragement but rather a fresh stimulus.
Robert South
No man who has not sat in the assemblies of men can know the light odd and uncertain ways in which decisions are often arrived at.
Sir Arthur Helps
Nothing is so exhausting as indecision and nothing is so futile.
Bertrand Russell
Decision is a sharp knife that cuts clean and straight indecision a dull one that hacks and tears and leaves ragged edges behind it.
Gordon Graham
A man without decision can never be said to belong to himself he is as a wave of the sea or a feather in the air which every breeze blows about.
John Foster
It is better to arm and strengthen your hero than to disarm and enfeeble your foe.
Anne Brontë
I couldn't claim that I have never felt the urge to explore evil but when you descend into hell you have to be very careful.
Kathleen Raine
Our danger is not too few but too many options ... to be puzzled by innumerable alternatives.
Sir Richard Livingstone
When you cannot make up your mind between two evenly balanced courses of action choose the bolder.
W. J. Slim
Better to be without logic than without feeling.
Charlotte Brontë
Man is a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal.
Alexander Hamilton
Imagination took the reins and Reason slow-paced though surefooted was unequal to a race with so eccentric and flighty a companion.
Fanny Burney
Many persons of high intelligence have notoriously poor judgement.
Sydney J. Harris
The tendency of modern science is to reduce proof to absurdity by continually reducing absurdity to proof.
Samuel Butler
Logic pervades the world the limits of the world are also the limits of logic.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Our deeds still travel with us from afar and what we have been makes us what we are.
George Eliot
The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.
George Eliot
Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge fitter to bruise than to polish.
Anne Bradstreet
She knew in her heart that to be without optimism that core of reasonless hope in the spirit rather than the brain was a fatal flaw the seed of death.
Anne Perry
Decide on what you think is right and stick to it.
George Eliot
One's mind has a way of making itself up in the background and it suddenly becomes clear what one means to do.
Arthur Christopher Benson
Human foresight often leaves its proudest possessor only a choice of evils.
Charles Caleb Colton
Where an opinion is general it is usually correct.
Jane Austen
The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.
George Eliot
Choice of attention ... is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences whatever they may be.
W.H. Auden
Will you walk into my parlour? Said the spider to a fly: '"Tis the prettiest little parlour That ever you did spy."
Mary Howitt
To know just what has do be done then to do it comprises the whole philosophy of practical life.
Sir William Osier
I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week if there is anything to be got by it.
Charles Dickens
Hood an ass with reverend purple. So you can hide his two ambitious ears and he shall pass for a cathedral doctor.
Ben Jonson
Frank and explicit - this is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and to confuse the mind of others.
Benjamin Disraeli
A delusion a mockery and a snare.
Lord Denman
All charming people have something to conceal usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
Cyril Connolly
A national debt if it is not excessive will be to us a national blessing.
Alexander Hamilton