Quotes by British Authors - Page 766

…she had nothing to do but to forgive herself and be happier than ever…
Jane Austen
Life is such unutterable hell, solely because it is sometimes beautiful. If we could only be miserable all the time, if there could be no such things as love or beauty or faith or hope, if I could be absolutely certain that my love would never be returned: how much more simple life would be. One could plod through the Siberian salt mines of existence without being bothered about happiness.
T.H. White
If you are doing things in order to be happy...you're doing them in the wrong order.
Michael Neill
Happy people are those who use a lower threshold in order to label an event positive.
David Niven
The glitter of the great world, you know, is only so much froth and spume: you may look in vain for happiness there.
Jude Morgan
Your words, thoughts, intentions and actions today are your best hope, comfort, building blocks and insurance for tomorrow. But it is now alone that is guaranteed – tomorrow is a dream, a maybe a potential gift. It’s now - not tomorrow - where happiness and fulfilment live...awaiting your discovery. It’s all this that will make each extra day that may arrive extra special and rich.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
It has been observed in all ages that the advantages of nature or of fortune have contributed very little to the promotion of happiness; and that those whom the splendour of their rank, or the extent of their capacity, have placed upon the summits of human life, have not often given any just occasion to envy in those who look up to them from a lower station; whether it be that apparent superiority incites great designs, and great designs are naturally liable to fatal miscarriages; or that the general lot of mankind is misery, and the misfortunes of those whose eminence drew upon them an universal attention, have been more carefully recorded, because they were more generally observed, and have in reality only been more conspicuous than others, not more frequent, or more severe.
Samuel Johnson
Money is time. With money I buy for cheerful use the hours which otherwise would not in any sense be mine; nay, which would make me their miserable bondsman.
George Gissing
A sense of peace came over me and I must have been smiling as I fell asleep.
Harry Bernstein
My parents have been married forty-two years. I wonder how many of those were happy.
Michael Palin
May I nurture the serenity to accept the things I cannot change the courage to change the things I can change and wisdom to know the difference
Frank Ra (Exstatica)
Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for a moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands between them and the recognition of their need; He makes that life less sweet to them.If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is 'nothing better' now to be had.
C.S. Lewis
He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have led to something; and found consolation in trifles so slight compared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.
Virginia Woolf
When I was a boy, I naively thought that this thing called happiness would be something I would wake up to find every day once I could smoke, drink and fornicate.
Jeffrey Bernard
People argue themselves out of their pleasures
Jude Morgan
I'm not "happy" but I'm not unhappy about it.
Alan Bennett
A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Money can't buy love, but it improves your bargaining position.
Christopher Marlowe
Move on. Be well. Go for it!
Sally Stubbs
That sense of happiness just out beyond my reach - I'm not sure I'd grasped that exactly, but I'd got something close to it, contentment maybe, or at least a functioning routine with regular rewards.
Sebastian Faulks
I have wanted only one thing to make me happy. That thing is everything.
Sebastian Horsley
There are few nicer things than sitting up in bed, drinking strong tea, and reading.
Alan Clark
I absolutely think that happiness is a choice. One of the most potent forces in human psychology is the power of habit. Do something, think something, often enough and it will become the only thing you can do or think. Choose to be unhappy and soon that’s all you will be. Live in a swamp and you’ll grow webbed feet.
Nicholas Evans
But 'tis a sad thing that all one's happiness is only that the world does not know you are miserable.
Dorothy Osborne
Happiness grows at our own firesides, and is not to be picked in strangers' gardens.
Douglas William Jerrold
The first sure symptom of a mind in health Is rest of heart and pleasure felt at home.
Edward Young
...anticipation of happiness can sometimes be as gratifying as its consummation.
Gaynor Arnold
Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Outside, she thought that there ought to be a word for it: the air temperature that was perfectly neither hot nor cold. One degree lower, and she might have felt a faint misgiving about not having brought a jacket. One degree higher, and a skim of sweat might have glistened at her hairline. But at this precise degree, she required neither wrap nor breeze. Were there a word for such a temperature, there would have to be a corollary for the particular ecstasy of greeting it - the heedlessness, the needlessness, the suspended lack of urgency, as if time could stop, or should. Usually temperature was a battle; only at this exact fulcrum was it an active delight.
Lionel Shriver
No man should ever completely realize his dreams. What else would there then be to live for?
David Gemmell
It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.
W Somerset Maugham
The good life doesn't knock on the door. Joy is a job.
Lionel Shriver
I never had one hour's happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death.
Charles Dickens
She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!
Virginia Woolf
Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy.
Ian McEwan
Nos-tal-gic,’ Akira said, as though it were a word he had been struggling to find. Then he said a word in Japanese, perhaps the Japanese for ‘nostalgic.’ ‘Nos-tal-gic. It is good to be nos-tal-gic. Very important.’‘Really, old fellow?’‘Important. Very important. Nostalgic. When we nostalgic, we remember. A world better than this world we discover when we grow. We remember and wish good world come back again. So very important. Just now, I had dream. I was boy. Mother, Father, close to me. in our house.’He fell silent and continued to gaze across the rubble.‘Akira,’ I said, sensing that the longer this talk went on, the greater was some danger I did not wish fully to articulate. ‘We should move on. We have much to do.
Kazuo Ishiguro
The years lay spread out before her, spacious untouched canvases on which she was presently going to paint the picture of her life. It was to be a very beautiful picture, she said to herself with an extraordinary feeling of proud confidence; not beautiful because of any gifts or skill of hers, for never was a woman more giftless, but because of all the untiring little touches, the ceaseless care for detail, the patient painting out of mistakes; and every touch and every detail was going to be aglow with the bright colours of happiness.
Elizabeth von Arnim
It is sad that people need alcohol to make them happy.
Habeeb Akande
It was not often that Flay approved of happiness in others. He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt. But on an occasion such as this it was different, for the spirit of convention was being rigorously adhered to, and in between his ribs Mr. Flay experienced twinges of pleasure.
Mervyn Peake
If the sun is shining, stand in it- yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass- they have to- because time passes. The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centred. What you are pursuing is meaning- a meaningful life... There are times when it will go so wrong that you will be barely alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.
Jeanette Winterson
I took the dog out for a walk tonight, and together we wandered across the meadow next door. It was a warm summer's night, dark, and moonless. There were a handful of fireflies flickering intermittently, some so close to me I could see they were burning green as they flew, and some further away, who seemed to be flashing white.And in the sky above them a continual roil of distant summer lightning (the storm distant enough that it was silent) burned and flashed and illuminated the clouds. It seemed as if the lightning bugs were talking to the lightning, in a perfect call and response of flash and counterflash. I watched the sky and the meadow flash and flash while the dog walked ahead of me, and realised that I was perfectly happy...
Neil Gaiman
Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door.
Jeanette Winterson
You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.
Lawrence Durrell
I want to be careful not to throw all this away. This is happiness. I think this is what happiness is. I haven't got it yet, but I can sense it out there. I feel I'm close to it. Some days, I'm so close I can almost smell it.
Sebastian Faulks
Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile.
G.K. Chesterton
Why do I want to run from happiness?
Mary Balogh
How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!
Jane Austen
He will make you happy, Fanny; I know he will make you happy; but you will make him everything.
Jane Austen
She was happy, she knew she was happy, and knew she ought to be happy.
Jane Austen
He was persuaded he could know no happiness but in the society of one with whom he could for ever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul.
Horace Walpole
So he caught her in his arms and kissed her, and they were very happy, and told each other what a beautiful world it was, and how wonderful it was that they should have found each other, seeing that the world is not only beautiful but rather large.
E Nesbit
Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.
Julian Barnes
A lifetime of lonely regret or happiness with some pain along the way.
Melissa Nathan
Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.
Lionel Shriver
There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.
Anthony Trollope
-Paint-My girlfriend is so besotted that she can't take her eyes off me. After we've turned out the light she puts on her night-vision goggles, and watched me as I sleep. Quite often I am woken by her sighing and involuntary yelps of happiness. This has been going on for years, and is showing no sign of abating. Once I asked her to stop all this infra-red activity, but it didn't really work; I'd wake up to find her covering me in luminous paint, and softly whispering, 'Sometimes I wonder if you know how much I love you.
Dan Rhodes
The midsummer sun shines but dim, The fields strive in vain to look gay; But when I am happy in Him December's as pleasant as May.
John Newton
These men are worth your tears. You are not worth their merriment.
Wilfred Owen
If I am destined to be happy with you here—how short is the longest Life—I wish to believe in immortality—I wish to live with you for ever.
John Keats
According to the Buddha, the failure to recognize the illusion of the self is the source of all ignorance and unhappiness. It is only by renouncing the self, that is, by dropping his ego defences and committing metaphorical suicide, that a person can open up to different modes of being and relating and thereby transform himself into a pure essence of humanity. In so doing, he becomes free to recast himself as a much more joyful and productive person, and attains the only species of transcendence and immortality that is open to man.
Neel Burton