Quotes by British Authors - Page 767

Money is made at Christmas out of holly and mistletoe, but who save the vendors would greatly care if no green branch were procurable? One symbol, indeed, has obscured all others--the minted round of metal. And one may safely say that, of all the ages since a coin first became the symbol of power, ours is that in which it yields to the majority of its possessors the poorest return in heart's contentment.
George Gissing
It's impossible to be unhappy while wearing a poncho!
Noel Fielding
The bitterness of joy lies in the knowledge that it cannot last. Nor should joy last beyond a certain season, for, after that season, even joy would become merely habit.
Tanith Lee
As Venus within Eros does not really aim at pleasure, so Eros does not aim at happiness. We may think he does, but when he is brought to the test it proves otherwise... For it is the very mark of Eros that when he is in us we had rather share unhappiness with the Beloved than be happy on any other terms.
C.S. Lewis
I was happy, but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.
Jeanette Winterson
It's about the quality of the worry," I said. "I have happier worries now than I used to.
David Gilmour
The really happy person is the one who can enjoy the scenery, even when they have to take a detour.
James Hopwood Jeans
She couldn't avoid being serious about things she cared for, and happiness made her grave at the thought of all the things which might destroy it.
Graham Greene
Sadness is never bad," said Amparo. "Sadness is the mirror of being happy
Tim Willocks
We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.
John Fowles
I wish I had never been born," she said. "What are we born for?" "For infinite happiness," said the Spirit. "You can step out into it at any moment...
C.S. Lewis
There is no happily-ever-after to run to. We have to work for happiness.
Mary Balogh
Whoever said happiness needs a plan?
Robert Holden
He had awoken too late for happiness, but not for strength, and could feel an austere joy, as of a warrior who is homeless but stands fully armed.
E.M. Forster
What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime.
Christopher Hitchens
But the happiest people are the ones who understand that good things occur when one allows them to.
Danny Wallace
One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.' To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: 'This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.
Alan Bennett
Everyone who is not happy must be shot.
John le Carré
Honest, open communication is the only street that leads us into the real world... We then begin to grow as never before. And once we are on this road, happiness cannot be far away.
John Powell
My happiness has to come from within myself or it is too fragile a thing to be of any use to me and too much of a burden to benefit any of my loved ones.
Mary Balogh
He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt.
Mervyn Peake
And from the midst of cheerless gloomI passed to bright unclouded day.
Emily Brontë
Men spend their lives in anticipations,—in determining to be vastly happy at some period when they have time. But the present time has one advantage over every other—it is our own. Past opportunities are gone, future have not come. We may lay in a stock of pleasures, as we would lay in a stock of wine; but if we defer the tasting of them too long, we shall find that both are soured by age.
Charles Caleb Colton
The secret to happiness is the journey, not the destination.
Claire Chilton
Why did you look at the sunset?'Philip answered with his mouth full:Because I was happy.
W Somerset Maugham
I want that. I want that awful intense and serious unhappiness, cos then I might feel better, and then I might be happy.
David Thewlis
After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?
E.M. Forster
Live your life, sing your song. Not full of expectations. Not for the ovations. But for the joy of it.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say "yesterday I was happy, today I am not.
E.M. Forster
Happiness isn't a thing. You can't go out and get it like a cup of tea. It's the way you feel about things.
Diana Wynne Jones
People who can change and change again are so much more reliable and happier than those who can’t
Stephen Fry
I would cling to unhappiness because it was a known, familiar state. When I was happier, it was because I knew I was on my way back to misery. I've never been convinced that happiness is the object of the game. I'm wary of happiness.
Hugh Laurie
Happiness does not depend on outward circumstances, but on the state of the heart.
J.C. Ryle
He went to the church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and for, and patted the children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of homes, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed of any walk, that anything, could give him so much happiness. (p. 119)
Charles Dickens
The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.
Quentin Crisp
To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.
Bertrand Russell
Most people think, when they're young, that they're going to the top of their chosen world, and that the climb up is only a formality. Without that faith, I suppose, they might never start. Somewhere on the way they lift their eyes to the summit and know they aren't going to reach it; and happiness then is looking down and enjoying the view they've got, not envying the one they haven't.
Dick Francis
Maybe this is a characteristic of happy people. An ability to be entertained by the world.
Clare Morrall
I believe that being happy is the only important thing. Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or torturous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive.
Joanne Harris
I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists. I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings are only the objects of pity, and that kind of love which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Lord, make me nowAs happy as the field.With flowers enriched...
Eileen A. Soper
An ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is always possible to be happy.
Augustine Birrell
Have you noticed how nobody ever looks up? Nobody looks at chimneys, or trees against the sky, or the tops of buildings. Everybody just looks down at the pavement or their shoes. The whole world could pass them by and most people wouldn't notice.
Julie Andrews Edwards
A doctor, a logician and a marine biologist had also just arrived, flown in at phenomenal expense from Maximegalon to try to reason with the lead singer who had locked himself in the bathroom with a bottle of pills and was refusing to come out till it could be proved conclusively to him that he wasn't a fish. The bass player was busy machine-gunning his bedroom and the drummer was nowhere on board.Frantic inquiries led to the discovery that he was standing on a beach on Santraginus V over a hundred light years away where, he claimed, he had been happy for over half an hour now and had found a small stone that would be his friend.
Douglas Adams
Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, selfishness, evil -- or else an absolute ignorance.
Graham Greene
All animals except man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.
Samuel Butler
What good is money if it can't buy happiness?
Agatha Christie
The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil, in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to someone else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
John Stuart Mill
I think probably kindness is my number one attribute in a human being. I'll put it before any of the things like courage or bravery or generosity or anything else.Brian Sibley: Or brains even?Oh gosh, yes, brains is one of the least. You can be a lovely person without brains, absolutely lovely. Kindness - that simple word. To be kind - it covers everything, to my mind.If you're kind that's it.
Roald Dahl
Marriage is just a piece of paper if it's not a happy one.
Phil Lester
Love is the energy of life.
Robert Browning
It is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations.
Bertrand Russell
Happiness is a gift and the trick is not to expect it, but to delight in it when it comes.
Charles Dickens
Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.
Virginia Woolf
Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone has said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shift of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it.
Jeanette Winterson
I think people would be happier if they admitted things more often. In a sense we are all prisoners of some memory, or fear, or disappointment - we are all defined by something we can’t change.
Simon Van Booy
I want him to be happy. And I want you to be happy, too. Even if you can only find that happiness without me.
S.J. Watson
But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.''In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy.' 'All right then,' said the Savage defiantly, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.''Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.' There was a long silence. 'I claim them all,' said the Savage at last.Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. 'You're welcome," he said.
Aldous Huxley
Call no man happy, said Shadow, until he is dead
Neil Gaiman
I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.
P.D. James