Quotes by British Authors - Page 760

Mind led bodyto the edge of the precipice.They stared in desireat the naked abyss.If you love me, said mind,take that step into silence.If you love me, said body,turn and exist.
Anne Stevenson
It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.
Arthur Conan Doyle
The point is, you have family and friends who love you. You have a world out there just waiting for you to conquer it. You have a life that will be anything you make it. That's the point.
Malorie Blackman
There was something better in life than this rub­bish, if only he could get to it—love—nobility—big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science could reach, but they existed for ever, full of woods some of them, and arched with majestic sky and a friend. . .
E.M. Forster
I have spoken words of hope. But only of hope. Hope is not victory.
J.R.R. Tolkien
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing
Raymond Williams
What we have at the moment isn't as the old liturgies used to say, 'the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead,' but a vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end.
N.T. Wright
He never had any real hope in the affair from the beginning;but being a cheerful hobbit he had not needed hope,as long as despair could be postponed.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Above all shadows rides the Sunand Stars for ever dwell:I will not say the Day is done,nor bid the Stars farewell.
J.R.R. Tolkien
We are the intelligent elite among animal life on earth and whatever our mistakes, [Earth] needs us. This may seem an odd statement after all that I have said about the way 20th century humans became almost a planetary disease organism. But it has taken [Earth] 2.5 billion years to evolve an animal that can think and communicate its thoughts. If we become extinct she has little chance of evolving another.
James E. Lovelock
...left to ourselves we lapse into a kind of collusion with entrophy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there's nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong. Our task in the present...is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.
N.T. Wright
HELP!”I race to the square, crossing it, looking all around, listening out-..It’s empty.Viola’s breathing heavy in my arms .And Haven is empty.I reach the middle of the square.I don’t see nor hear a soul.I spin around again.“HELP!” I cry.But there’s no one.Haven’s completely empty.There ain’t hope here after all.
Patrick Ness
but a sanguine temper, though for ever expecting more good than occurs, does not always pay for its hopes by any proportionate depression. it soon flies over the present failure, and begins to hope again.
Jane Austen
The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.
Rebecca West
Now hollow fires burn out to black,And lights are fluttering low:Square your shoulders, lift your packAnd leave your friends and go.O never fear, lads, naught’s to dread,Look not left nor right: In all the endless road you treadThere’s nothing but the night.
A.E. Housman
hope for the best, prepare for the worst
Chris Bradford
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
Chris Bradford
My belief is that if we live another century or so — I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals — and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton's bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down.
Virginia Woolf
Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.
George Eliot
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light;Tot wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim; Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;Not as she is, but as she fills his dreams.
Christina Rossetti
I want to reconcile the violence in your heart.I want to recognize your beauty's not just a mask.I want to exorcise the demons from your past.I want to satisfy the undisclosed desires in your heart.
Matthew Bellamy
No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes—forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.
Neil Gaiman
Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.
Graham Greene
Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep.
David Almond
But what is Hope? Nothing but the paint on the face of Existence; the least touch of truth rubs it off, and then we see what a hollow-cheeked harlot we have got hold of.
George Gordon Byron
Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.
Alain de Botton
Being a cheerful hobbit, he had not needed hope, as long as despair could be postponed.
J.R.R. Tolkien
what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.
George Eliot
My days I devote to reading and experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights in the study of astronomy. There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope.
H.G.Wells
I have come," said a deep voice behind them. They turned and saw the Lion himself, so bright and real and strong that everything else began at once to look pale and shadowy compared with him.
C.S. Lewis
Courage will now be your best defence against the storm that is at hand-—that and such hope as I bring.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Hope springs eternal in the human breast; Man never Is, but always To be blest. The soul, uneasy, and confin'd from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come.
Alexander Pope
I am hope.
Neil Gaiman
At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.
C.S. Lewis
When by my solitary hearth I sit,When no fair dreams before my “mind’s eye” flit,And the bare heath of life presents no bloom;Sweet Hope, ethereal balm upon me shed,And wave thy silver pinions o’er my head.
John Keats
Hang in there. It is astonishing how short a time it can take for very wonderful things to happen.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
Alain de Botton
Every moment has its pleasures and its hope.
Jane Austen
How fortunate we were who still had hope I did not then realise; I could not know how soon the time would come when we should have no more hope, and yet be unable to die
Vera Brittain
I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.
Jeanette Winterson
I am, and always will be, the optimist. The hoper of far-flung hopes, and the dreamer of improbable dreams.
Eleventh Doctor
T is not too late to seek a newer world.Push off, and sitting well in order smiteThe sounding furrows; for my purpose holdsTo sail beyond the sunset, and the bathsOf all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’We are not now that strength which in old daysMov’d earth and heaven, that which we are, we are:One equal temper of heroic hearts,Made weak by time and fate, but strong in willTo strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Alfred Tennyson
Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.
G.K. Chesterton
What a lovely thing a rose is!"He walked past the couch to the open window and held up the drooping stalk of a moss-rose, looking down at the dainty blend of crimson and green. It was a new phase of his character to me, for I had never before seen him show any keen interest in natural objects. "There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.
Arthur Conan Doyle
You said you knew the perfect place to run to. A place that was empty of people, and buildings, and far, far away. A place covered in blood-red earth and sleeping life. A place longing to come alive again. It's a place for disappearing, you'd said, a place for getting lost... and for getting found.I'll take you there, you'd said.And I could say that I agreed.
Lucy Christopher
The Christian says, 'Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or to be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that country and to help others to do the same.
C.S. Lewis
A red-gold glow burst suddenly across the enchanted sky above them as an edge of dazzling sun appeared over the sill of the nearest window. The light hit both of their faces at the same time, so that Voldemort's was suddenly a flaming blur. Harry heard the high voice shriek as he too yelled his best hope to the heavens, pointing Draco's wand:"Avada Kedavra!""Expelliarmus!"The bang was like a cannon blast, and the golden flames that erupted between them, at the dead center of the circle they had been treading, marked the point where the spells collided. Harry saw Voldemort's green jet meet his own spell, saw the Elder Wand fly high, dark against the sunrise, spinning across the enchanted ceiling, spinning through the air toward the master it would not kill, who had come to take full possession of it at last.
J.K. Rowling
If winter comes, can spring be far behind?
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Out of doubt, out of dark to the day's risingI came singing into the sun, sword unsheathing.To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking:Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!
J.R.R. Tolkien
The chief beauty about timeis that you cannot waste it in advance.The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you,as perfect, as unspoiled,as if you had never wasted or misapplieda single moment in all your life.You can turn over a new leaf every hourif you choose.
Arnold Bennett
Hope itself is like a star- not to be seen in the sunshine of prosperity, and only to be discovered in the night of adversity.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
With every mistake, we must surely be learning.
George Harrison
Hope may be the thing that pulls you forward, may be the thing that keeps you going, but that it's dangerous, that it's painful and risky, that it's making a dare in the world and when has the world ever let us win a dare?
Patrick Ness
At what point do you give up - decide enough is enough? There is only one answer really. Never.
Tabitha Suzuma
I turned in my seat. Will’s face was in shadow and I couldn’t quite make it out.‘Just hold on. Just for a minute.’‘Are you all right?’ I found my gaze dropping towards his chair, afraid some part of him was pinched, or trapped, that I had got something wrong.‘I’m fine. I just . . . ’I could see his pale collar, his dark suit jacket a contrast against it.‘I don’t want to go in just yet. I just want to sit and not have to think about . . . ’ He swallowed.Even in the half-dark it seemed effortful.‘I just . . . want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more.’I released the door handle.‘Sure.’I closed my eyes and lay my head against the headrest, and we sat there together for a while longer, two people lost in remembered music, half hidden in the shadow of a castle on a moonlit hill.
Jojo Moyes
Though nothing can bring back the hourOf splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;We will grieve not, rather findStrength in what remains behind;In the primal sympathyWhich having been must ever be...
William Wordsworth
...But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since, its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness. In a moment the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside. The more emotional Pathans are powerless to resist. All rational considerations are forgotten. Seizing their weapons, they become Ghazis—as dangerous and as sensible as mad dogs: fit only to be treated as such. While the more generous spirits among the tribesmen become convulsed in an ecstasy of religious bloodthirstiness, poorer and more material souls derive additional impulses from the influence of others, the hopes of plunder and the joy of fighting. Thus whole nations are roused to arms. Thus the Turks repel their enemies, the Arabs of the Soudan break the British squares, and the rising on the Indian frontier spreads far and wide. In each case civilisation is confronted with militant Mahommedanism. The forces of progress clash with those of reaction. The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace.
Winston S. Churchill
The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man
T.S Eliot
Oft hope is born when all is forlorn.
J.R.R. Tolkien
It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.
J.R.R. Tolkien