Quotes by British Authors - Page 723

The really essential factors of success in any undertaking are money and opportunity, and as a rule, the man who can make the first can make the second.
Dorothy L. Sayers
We all have our youthful follies, embarassing to recall -- but people somehow find it hard to dismiss as a youthful folly anything that has happened to be a financial success.
John Wyndham
Success is a decision, not a gift.
Steve Backley
We're all to driven by materialism. Obsessed with success. With money. With trying to impress people who'll never be impressed.
Sophie Kinsella
Success is realising the true joy and wonder of life can only be yours if you follow your own intuition, aiming to achieve your bliss.
Steven Redhead
For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations....Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle.
Alain de Botton
No man can be a failure if he thinks he's a success; If he thinks he is a winner, then he is.
Robert W. Service
Los Angeles is a town where status is all and status is only given to success. Dukes and millionaires and playboys by the dozen may arrive and be glad-handed for a time, but they are unwise if they choose to live there because the town is, perhaps even creditably, committed to recognising only professional success, and nothing else, to be of lasting value. The burdensome obligation imposed on all its inhabitants is therefore to present themselves as successes, because otherwise they forfeit their right to respect in that environment ... There is no place in that town for the "interesting failure" or for anyone who is not determined on a life that will be shaped in a upward-heading curve.
Julian Fellowes
He shrugged his shoulders to shift the pain of failure---the pain that is so much greater than the pleasure of success.
Ian Fleming
I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.
Lawrence Durrell
Living as we do in an age of noise and bluster, success is now measured accordingly. We must all be seen, and heard, and on the air.
Daphne du Maurier
You have to take your own bold approach, and if you do you will be rewarded with success. Or calamitous failure. That can happen too.
Steven Moffat
Sure I am this day we are masters of our fate, that the task which has been set before us is not above our strength; that its pangs and toils are not beyond our endurance. As long as we have faith in our own cause and an unconquerable will to win, victory will not be denied us.
Winston S. Churchill
Success in this world depends on knowing exactly how little effort each job is worth...distribution of energy...
Evelyn Waugh
We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.
Rudyard Kipling
To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
Walter Pater
It's no use saying, "We are doing our best." You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.
Winston S. Churchill
The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.
Benjamin Disraeli
People can change anything they want to, and that means everything in the world.
Joe Strummer
The difference between Success and failure is not giving up.
Steven Redhead
With ordinary talent and extraordinary perseverance, all things are attainable
Thomas Fowell Buxton
We set out to save the Shire, Sam and it has been saved - but not for me.
J.R.R. Tolkien
The difference between greed and ambition is a greedy person desires things he isn't prepared to work for.
Habeeb Akande
The secret to success is constancy of purpose.
Benjamin Disraeli
Nearly' only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades.
Neil Gaiman
...it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done.
Terry Pratchett
Keep your friends for friendship, but work with the skilled and competent
Robert Greene
We are all failures- at least the best of us are.
J.M. Barrie
When you show yourself to the world and display your talents, you naturally stir all kinds of resentment, envy, and other manifestations of insecurity... you cannot spend your life worrying about the petty feelings of others
Robert Greene
Kites rise highest against the wind, not with it.
Winston S. Churchill
Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.
Winston S. Churchill
Knowledge is not the same as wisdom. You can know all the facts and still not be able to act wisely. But without knowledge, it is harder to be wise –– even if what wisdom tells us is that knowledge is very often provisional and that we cannot wait to have certainty about every fact before we act.
Dan Smith
Man thinks many things. He thinks he is One. He is usually several. Until he becomes One, he cannot have a fair idea of what he is at all.
Idries Shah
If you assume that it is there, you will generally not be far off the truth.
Idries Shah
In fact there is only your own instinct?Not instinct, Hastings. Instinct is a bad word. It is my knowledge-my experience-that tells me that something about that letter is wrong-
Agatha Christie
Why did I do such-and-such a thing?' is all very well. But what about 'How otherwise could I have done it?'.
Idries Shah
Is your division of Understanding into Greater and Lesser common to all Sufis? Nothing which is put into words is common to all Sufis.
Idries Shah
An immense and ever-increasing wealth of knowledge is scattered about the world today; knowledge that would probably suffice to solve all the mighty difficulties of our age, but it is dispersed and unorganized. We need a sort of mental clearing house for the mind: a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared
H.G.Wells
It was easier to know it than to explain why I knew it.
Arthur Conan Doyle
In the pursuit of knowledge, no one should travel alone
C.S. Woolley
Man does not know most of the rules on which he acts and even what we call his intelligence is largely a system of rules which operate on him but which he does not know.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Look at their arts, their power of turning stone into lifelike figures, and above all, the way in which they can transfer their thoughts to white leaves, so that others, many many years hence, can read them and know all that was passing, and what men thought and did in the long bygone. Truly it is marvelous.
G.A. Henty
You do realize as you grow older that almost nobody knows what they are talking about.
John Cleese
Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on the rock. I wished sometimes to shake off all thought and feeling, but I learned that there was but one means to overcome the sensation of pain, and that was death -- a state which I feared yet did not understand.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Mellow doesn't describe me. I'm hungry every day.
Alan Rickman
The clothes may vary, but the person is the same.
Idries Shah
Where is the land of Luthany,Where is the tract of Elenore?I am bound therefore.'Pierce thy heart to find the key;With thee takeOnly what none else would keep;Learn to dream when thou dost wake;Learn to wake when thou dost sleep.Learn to water joy with tears,Learn from fears to vanquish fears;To hope, for thou dar'st not despair;Exult, for that thou dar'st not grieve;Plough thou the rock until it bear;Know, for thou else couldst not believe;Lose, that the lost thou may'st receive;Die, for none other way canst live.'When earth and heave lay down their veil,And that apocalypse turns thee pale;When thy seeing blindeth theeTo what thy fellow-mortals see;When their sight to thee is sightless;Their living, death; their light, most lightless;Search no more--Pass the gates of Luthany,Tread the region Elenore!'Where is the land of Luthany?And where the region Elenore?I do faint therefore.'When to the new eyes of theeAll things by immortal power,Near or far,HiddenlyTo each other linked are,That thou canst not stir a flowerWithout troubling of a star;When thy song is shield and mirrorTo the fair snake curled pain,Where thou dar'st affront her terrorThat on her thou may'st attainPersean Conquest; seek no more,O seek no more!Pass the gates of Luthany,Tread the region Elenore!
Francis Thompson
In my own case, I employed this experiment mainly in order to seek for the barrier, if any, which divides our knowledge of the past from our knowledge of the future. And the odd thing was that there did not seem to be any such barrier at all.
J.W. Dunne
You will die, and I, and all we can create—why not a city? But if there is one thing that deserves to be immortal, it is knowledge.
John Brunner
for to the arguments of great thinkers there is no end, the idea of argument itself being a tool to improve the mind, the sharpest of all tools, born of the love of knowledge, which is to say, philosophy.
Salman Rushdie
Suffering is a form of knowledge. It tells us what is wrong with our world.
David Smail
The teaching must, of course, work with the best part of the individual, must be directed to his or her real capacity.
Idries Shah
Depend upon it, he who wishes to win the prize must come on the principle that two and two make four.
Nicholas Wiseman
We know amazingly little about what happens beneath our feet. It is fairly remarkable to think that Ford has been building cars and baseball has been playing World Series for longer than we have known that the Earth has a core. And of course the idea that the continents move about on the surface like lily pads has been common wisdom for much less than a generation. “Strange as it may seem,” wrote Richard Feynman, “"we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the Sun far better than we understand the interior of the Earth.
Bill Bryson
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaFlattery:One of the most promising of businesses: always brisk.
Idries Shah
I know nothing,” I say, cheerfully.“You never seem to. Have you ever wondered why that is?”“It’s very deliberate. I’ve found that knowledge is usually a burden. I prefer to be surprised and then eventually horrified.
Matthew Norman
Ideological opinion is not merely distinct from knowledge but the enemy of knowledge.
Roger Scruton
As humans, we have invented lots of useful kinds of lie. As well as lies-to-children ('as much as they can understand') there are lies-to-bosses ('as much as they need to know') lies-to-patients ('they won't worry about what they don't know') and, for all sorts of reasons, lies-to-ourselves. Lies-to-children is simply a prevalent and necessary kind of lie. Universities are very familiar with bright, qualified school-leavers who arrive and then go into shock on finding that biology or physics isn't quite what they've been taught so far. 'Yes, but you needed to understand that,' they are told, 'so that now we can tell you why it isn't exactly true.' Discworld teachers know this, and use it to demonstrate why universities are truly storehouses of knowledge: students arrive from school confident that they know very nearly everything, and they leave years later certain that they know practically nothing. Where did the knowledge go in the meantime? Into the university, of course, where it is carefully dried and stored.
Terry Pratchett
By degrees they spoke of education , and the book-learning that forms one part of it; and the result was that Ruth determined to get up early all throughout the bright summer mornings, to acquire the knowledge hereafter to be give to her child. Her mind was uncultivated, her reading scant; beyond the mere mechanical arts of education she knew nothing; but she had a refined taste, and excellent sense and judgment to separate the true from the false.
Elizabeth Gaskell
Knowledge gives nothing to a man until he gives everything to it.
Idries Shah