Quotes by British Authors - Page 73

Till tired he sleeps and life's poor play is o'er.
Alexander Pope
God's finger touched him and he slept.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
Sunset and evening star And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar When I put out to sea.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
First our pleasures die - and then Our hopes and then our fears - and when These are dead the debt is due Dust claims dust - and we die too.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumour and survival a thing not beyond the bounds of possibility.
Aldous Huxley
There is no such thing as death In nature nothing dies: From each sad moment of decay Some forms of life arise.
Charles Mackay
Death so called is a thing which makes men weep And yet a third of life is pass'd in sleep.
Lord Byron
Is death the last sleep? No it is the last final awakening.
Walter Scott
I cannot forgive my friends for dying: I do not find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Body and mind like man and wife do not always agree to die together.
Charles Caleb Colton
If this is dying I don't think much of it.
Lytton Strachey
If life must not be taken too seriously - then so neither must death.
Samuel Butler
Most people would die sooner than think in fact they do.
Bertrand Russell
It is a far far better thing that I do than anything I have ever done it is a far far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.
Charles Dickens
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath And after many a summer dieth the swan.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
He mourns the dead who lives as they desire.
Edward Young
At last God caught his eye.
Harry Secombe
One glance of Thine creates a day.
Isaac Watts
For death begins with life's first breath And life begins at touch of death.
John Oxenham
Tis of the tears which stars weep sweet with joy.
Francis Bailey
A blind man in a dark room - looking for a black hat which isn't there.
Lord Bowen
On with the dance! Let joy be unconfin'd No sleep till morn when Youth and Pleasure meet.
Lord Byron
Danger for danger's sake is senseless.
Leigh Hunt
Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West results from the combination of comfort and powerlessness.
Bertrand Russell
Cynicism is intellectual dandyism without the coxcomb's feathers.
George Meredith
Cynicism is humour in ill health.
H.G.Wells
We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion just as effectively as by bombs.
Kenneth Clark
Custom is the law of fools.
Sir John Vanbrugh
Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.
Samuel Johnson
The average man's opinions are much less foolish than they would be if he thought for himself.
Bertrand Russell
You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.
Max Beerbohm
It is not linen you're wearing out But human creatures' lives.
Thomas Hood
A myth is a fixed way of looking at the world which cannot be destroyed because looked at through the myth all evidence supports that myth.
Edward de Bono
Any fool can criticize and many of them do.
Archbishop C. Garbett
A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car.
Kenneth Tynan
The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism founded upon appreciation of beauty and of intellectual distinction and of duty.
Alfred North Whitehead
The test of a good critic is whether he knows when and how to believe on insufficient evidence.
Samuel Butler
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
Christopher Hampton
It is not expected of critics that they should help us to make sense of our lives they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.
Frank Kermode
Two and two continue to make four in spite of the whine of the amateur for three or the cry of the critic for five.
James McNeill Whistler
We enact many laws that manufacture criminals and then a few that punish them.
Abraham Tucker
Winston has written four volumes about himself and called it 'World Crisis'.
Arthur Balfour
Critics are the men who have failed in literature and art.
Benjamin Disraeli
As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair so an unsuccessful author turns critic.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard chiefly I think because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
Bertrand Russell
Society prepares the crime the criminal commits it.
Henry Thomas Buckle
All punishment is mischief. All punishment in itself is evil.
Jeremy Bentham
He that hath lost his credit is dead to the world.
George Edward Herbert
I wish I was as sure of anything as Macaulay is of everything.
William Windham
I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare My business is to create.
William Blake
All are but parts of one stupendous whole Whose body Nature is and God the soul.
Alexander Pope
What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.
Dean William R. Inge
Now I really make the little idea from clay and I hold it in my hand. I can turn it look at it from underneath see it from one view hold it against the sky imagine it any size I like and really be in control almost like God creating something.
Henry Moore
It is easier to suppose that the universe has existed from all eternity than to conceive a Being beyond its limits capable of creating it.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
God is in the world or nowhere creating continually in us and around us. Insofar as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine of God and that participation is his immortality ....
Alfred North Whitehead
In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.
E.M. Forster
It is never any good dwelling on goodbyes. It is not the being together that it prolongs it is the parting.
Elizabeth Asquith Bibesco
A human being does not cease to exist at death. It is change not destruction which takes place.
Florence Nightingale
Mourning is not forgetting. ... It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the dust.
Margery Allingham