Quotes by British Authors - Page 765

I was yours once till death if you cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now--I can't hang about whining for ever--and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked and attend to your own happiness?
E.M. Forster
Expectation and disappointment are far from friends but they are close relations.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
I went back to my room and spent all night contemplating whether it was possible in life not to be constantly let down. If it could ever be worth pinning your happiness to another person, when all other people ever seemed to do was disappear.
Olivia Sudjic
Dialogue is about freeing human beings from the beliefs and attitudes that make human beings miserable.
Oli Anderson
If I have one piece of advice to give you all about what to search for in your quest for What Next, it's to find where the line blurs between hard work and happiness for you. To find that thing where working hard at it makes you happy, and where you're happy to work hard at it.
Tom Fletcher
I've never had a moment when I thought: "Tom, you've made it!", and I don't think I want to, because that feels like you've reached the end; that you've crossed the finish line. But to me there is no end. An achievement is not a finish line; it's a checkpoint on a far greater journey. It's a moment to pause, to take a breath and look back and enjoy what you've experienced and be grateful for it, but then to turn around and look towards the next checkpoint, the next achievement.
Tom Fletcher
They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to each other till death. But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions' who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls.
E.M. Forster
Happiness is awaiting you every moment of each day for you to embrace. You just make the mistake that you need to achieve 'this' or 'that' or reach something you call 'success' in order to gain it.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
This was the simple happiness of complete harmony with her surroundings, the happiness that asks for nothing, that just accepts, just breathes, just is.
Elizabeth von Arnim
Are you happy?” asked Mr. Nancy, suddenly. He had been staring at Shadow for several hours. Whenever Shadow glanced over to his right, Mr. Nancy was looking at him with his earth-brown eyes. “Not really,” said Shadow. “But I’m not dead yet.” “Huh?” " 'Call no man happy until he is dead.’ Herodotus.” Mr. Nancy raised a white eyebrow, and he said, “I’m not dead yet, and, mostly because I’m not dead yet, I’m happy as a clamboy.” “The Herodotus thing. It doesn’t mean that the dead are happy,” said Shadow. “It means that you can’t judge the shape of someone’s life until it’s over and done.” “I don’t even judge then,” said Mr. Nancy. “And as for happiness, there’s a lot of different kinds of happiness, just as there’s a hell of a lot of different kinds of dead. Me, I’ll just take what I can get when I can get it.
Neil Gaiman
If you want to brighten up a person's day.Give them a rainbow.
Anthony T.Hincks
We weren’t happy together but we lived in a state of easy, mild contentment. We shared everything except the stupid fucking secret hanging round your neck. I imagined tiny photographs: portraits in sepia of your parents, their faces partially obscured by goitres. Meanwhile, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next year, maybe not even in a decade from now but one day: the planet would fall apart.
Jon Gresham
Unhappy! of course you'll be unhappy. Who the devil are you that you shouldn't be unhappy, like the mother that bore you?
G.K. Chesterton
Giving birth, for me, was like emerging from a car crash to find myself inexplicably, madly in love with Vladimir Putin.
Ruth Whippman
I is a dreamblowing giant,” the BFG said. “(...) I is scuddling away to other places to blow dreams into the bedrooms of sleeping children. Nice dreams. Lovely golden dreams. Dreams that is giving the dreamers a happy time.
Roald Dahl
...a being, with a capacity of reasoning, would not have failed to discover, as his faculties unfolded, that true happiness arose from the friendship and intimacy which can only be enjoyed by equals; and that charity is not a condescending distribution of alms, but an intercourse of good offices and mutual benefits, founded on respect for justice and humanity.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Happiness, said De Quincey, on his discovery of the paradise that he thought he had found in opium, could be sent down by the mail-coach; more truly I could announce my discovery that delight could be contained in small octavos and small type, in a bookshelf three feet long.
Arthur Machen
Witta feared nothing - except to be poor.
Rudyard Kipling
Philip thought that in throwing over the desire for happiness he was casting aside the last of his illusions. His life had seemed horrible when it was measured by its happiness, but now he seemed to gather strength as he realised that it might be measured by something else. Happiness mattered as little as pain. They came in, both of them, as all the other details of his life came in, to the elaboration of the design. He seemed for an instant to stand above the accidents of his existence, and he felt that they could not affect him again as they had done before. Whatever happened to him now would be one more motive to add to the complexity of the pattern, and when the end approached he would rejoice in its completion. It would be a work of art, and it would be none the less beautiful because he alone knew of its existence, and with his death it would at once cease to be.
W Somerset Maugham
Too late. It was all too late. But she went on, determined as ever and always trying to catch up.
Alan Bennett
I suppose if you love someone, you don´t stop them doing the things that make them happy.
Ann Cleeves
You know, once,” Robert said, “I was working in the shop, doing some repairs on a music box, and it was all going wrong. Da took me aside and told me to think of it like life: ‘It looks complicated when you see all the separate pieces, but the purpose of the music box is to play joyful music. You just have to remember how to fit them together so it will. The same with life really. It’s just about the living of it. That’s all you have, and all you can do: live and be happy.
Peter Bunzl
My mind to me a kingdom is,Such present joys therein I find,That it excels all other blissThat world affords or grows by kind.Though much I want which most would have,Yet still my mind forbids to crave.
Edward Dyer
But in that first flush of victory and happiness and relief, and God knows what other emotions were involved in this great moment, we were all very much one, and we were all in a state of euphoria, drunk with our happiness.
Harry Bernstein
He stared to sea. "I gave up all ideas of practicing medicine. In spite of what I have just said about the wave and the water, in those years in France I am afraid I lived a selfish life. That is, I offered myself every pleasure. I traveled a great deal. I lost some money dabbling in the theatre, but I made much more dabbling on the Bourse. I gained a great many amusing friends, some of whom are now quite famous. But I was never very happy. I suppose I was fortunate. It took me only five years to discover what some rich people never discover — that we all have a certain capacity for happiness and unhappiness. And that the economic hazards of life do not seriously affect it.
John Fowles
He wished someone in the course of history had thought of striking that word and all its derivatives from the English Language - happy, happier, happiest, happiness. What the devil did the words really mean anyway? Why not just the word pleasure, which was far more... well, pleasant.
Mary Balogh
Yet some happiness must and would arise, from the very conviction, that he did suffer.
Jane Austen
She had received ideas which disposed her to be courteous and kind to all, and to pity every one, as being less happy than herself.
Jane Austen
…for I look upon the Frasers to be about as unhappy as most other married people.
Jane Austen
The successful cannot be unhappy -- it was a contradiction in terms.
Barry Unsworth
But to appear happy when I am so miserable — Oh! who can require it?
Jane Austen
I will not talk of my own happiness,' said he, 'great as it is, for I think only of yours. Compared with you, who has the right to be happy?
Jane Austen
I was uncomfortable enough. I was very uncomfortable, I may say unhappy.
Jane Austen
Happyish. Well, happyish isn't so bad.''It's the most we can hope for.
David Nicholls
Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot readThe hunter's waking thoughts.
W.H. Auden
The thought of all that happiness was hard to bear. What's the point of happiness when all it does is throw the facts of dying into clear relief?
Sebastian Faulks
I think now that this is the great division between people. There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, in-built, expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to be expected: that it is not, in fact, one of the rights of man. Nor, God knows, one of the rights of women.
Hilary Mantel
It was not often that Flay approved of happiness in others.
Mervyn Peake
The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury.
Alain de Botton
Yo no nací dichoso. De niño, mi himno favorito era: «Cansado del mundo y con el peso de mis pecados». A los cinco años yo pensaba que si había de vivir setenta no había pasado aún más que la catorceava parte de mi vida vital, y me parecía casi insoportable la enorme cantidad de aburrimiento que me aguardaba. En la adolescencia la vida me era odiosa, y estaba continuamente al borde del suicidio, del cual me libré gracias al deseo de saber más matemáticas. Hoy, por el contrario, gusto de la vida, y casi estoy por decir que cada año que pasa la encuentro más gustosa. Esto es debido, en parte, a haber descubierto cuáles eran las cosas que deseaba más y haber adquirido gradualmente muchas de ellas. En parte es debido también a haberme desprendido, felizmente, de ciertos deseos (la adquisición del conocimiento indudable acerca de algo) como esencialmente inasequibles. Pero en la mayor parte se debe a la preocupación, cada día menor, de mí mismo.
Bertrand Russell
An afternoon drive from Los Angeles will take you up into the high mountains, where eagles circle above the forests and the cold blue lakes, or out over the Mojave Desert, with its weird vegetation and immense vistas. Not very far away are Death Valley, and Yosemite, and Sequoia Forest with its giant trees which were growing long before the Parthenon was built; they are the oldest living things in the world. One should visit such places often, and be conscious, in the midst of the city, of their surrounding presence. For this is the real nature of California and the secret of its fascination; this untamed, undomesticated, aloof, prehistoric landscape which relentlessly reminds the traveller of his human condition and the circumstances of his tenure upon the earth. "You are perfectly welcome," it tells him, "during your short visit. Everything is at your disposal. Only, I must warn you, if things go wrong, don't blame me. I accept no responsibility. I am not part of your neurosis. Don't cry to me for safety. There is no home here. There is no security in your mansions or your fortresses, your family vaults or your banks or your double beds. Understand this fact, and you will be free. Accept it, and you will be happy.
Christopher Isherwood
Why are you unhappy?Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself—and there isn’t one.
Wei Wu Wei
Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime.
J.G. Ballard
We all need something that takes us out of day to day and reminds us that it's all ok."
Ian Tucker
I've been quite happy. Look, here are my proofs. Remember that I am indifferent to discomforts which would harass other folk. What do the circumstances of life matter if your dreams make you lord paramount of time and space?
W Somerset Maugham
The happiest people don’t bother about whether life is unfair. They just concentrate on what they have.
Andrew Matthews
A felicidade nunca é graciosa.Happiness is never gracious.
Aldous Huxley
One honest John Tompkins, a hedger & ditcher, Although he was poor, did not want to be richer;For all such vain wishes in him were preventedBy a fortunate habit of being contented.
Jane Taylor
Happiness must preclude false indulgence and physic.
Jane Austen
Wherein lies happiness? In that which becksOur ready minds to fellowship divine,A fellowship with essence; till we shine,Full alchemiz’d, and free of space. BeholdThe clear religion of heaven!
John Keats
Happiness is like time and space--we make and measure it ourselves; it is a fancy--as big, as little, as you please; just a thing of contrasts and comparisons, like health or strength or beauty or any other good--that wouldn't even be noticed but for sad personal experience of its opposite!--or its greater!
George du Maurier
If you investigate the matter deeply enough and widely enough, you will find that happiness eludes nearly all men despite the fact that they are forever seeking it. The fortunate and successful few are those who have stopped seeking with the ego alone and allow the search to be directed inwardly by the higher self. They alone can find a happiness unblemished by defects or deficiencies, a Supreme Good which is not a further source of pain and sorrow but an endless source of satisfaction and peace.
Paul Brunton
However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something more than a punishment or a penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative.
Alain de Botton
Listen, Harriet. I do unterstand. I know you don't want either to give or to take ... You don't want ever again to have to depend for happiness on another person.""That's true. That's the truest thing you ever said.""All right. I can respect that. Only you've got to play the game. Don't force an emotional situation and then blame me for it.""But I don't want any situation. I want to be left in peace.
Dorothy L. Sayers
...[A] certain degree of un-understanding (not mis-, but un-) is the only possible sanctuary which one human being can offer to another in the midst of the devastating intimacy of a happy marriage.
Jan Struther
I hate you. I wish you was dead."Mrs. Carey gasped. He said the words so savagely that it gave her quite a start. She had nothing to say. She sat down in her husband's chair; and as she thought of her desire to love the friendless, crippled boy and her eager wish that he should love her--she was a barren woman and, even though it was clearly God's will that she should be childless, she could scarcely bear to look at little children sometimes, her heart ached so--the tears rose to her eyes and one by one, slowly, rolled down her cheeks. Philip watched her in amazement. She took out her handkerchief, and now she cried without restraint. Suddenly Philip realised that she was crying because of what he had said, and he was sorry. He went up to her silently and kissed her. It was the first kiss he had ever given herwithout being asked. And the poor lady, so small in her black satin, shrivelled up and sallow, with her funny corkscrew curls, took the little boy on her lap and put her arms around him and wept as though her heart would break. But her tears were partly tears of happiness, for she felt that the strangeness between them was gone. She loved him now with a new love because he had made her suffer.
W Somerset Maugham
But there was happiness elsewhere which no description can reach.
Jane Austen
If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.
Bertrand Russell
Peace and happiness are powerful weapons against the Egos.
Belsebuub
Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Civilization, man feels once more happy.
Richard Francis Burton