Quotes by British Authors - Page 768

There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.
Ian McEwan
Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.
Iris Murdoch
To me, the meaning of a human life is to be happy. It's to achieve happiness right now, it's to make sure you're happy in the future. And if some people on YouTube try to have a message to give people, I guess that mine is: do whatever you have to do to be happy.
Dan Howell
[I]t is well to have as many holds upon happiness as possible.
Jane Austen
I put my hand on the altar rail. 'What if ... what if Heaven is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when you're dying of thirst, or when someone's nice to you for no reason, or ...' Mam's pancakes with Toblerone sauce; Dad dashing up from the bar just to tell me, 'Sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite'; or Jacko and Sharon singing 'For She's A Squishy Marshmallow' instead of 'For She's A Jolly Good Fellow' every single birthday and wetting themselves even though it's not at all funny; and Brendan giving his old record player to me instead of one of his mates. 'S'pose Heaven's not like a painting that's just hanging there for ever, but more like ... Like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snatches, while you're alive, from passing cars, or ... upstairs windows when you're lost ...
David Mitchell
Why not seize the pleasure at once? -- How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!
Jane Austen
Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides... I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life's voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.
David Mitchell
Create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you, --will invite you to add something to the pleasure of others, --or to diminish something of their pains.
Jeremy Bentham
A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.
Jane Austen
Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people's.
Bertrand Russell
He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.
William Blake
You were already in a prison. You've been in a prison all your life. Happiness is a prison, Evey. Happiness is the most insidious prison of all. Your lover lived in the penitentiary that we are all born into, and was forced to rake the dregs of that world for his living. He knew affection and tenderness but only briefly. Eventually, one of the other inmates stabbed him with a cutlass and he drowned upon his own blood. Is that it, Evey? Is that the happiness worth more than freedom? It's not an uncommon story, Evey. Many convicts meet with miserable ends. Your mother. Your father. Your lover. One by one, taken out behind the chemical sheds... and shot. All convicts, hunched and deformed by the smallness of their cells, the weight of their chains, the unfairness of their sentences. I didn't put you in a prison, Evey. I just showed you the bars.''You're wrong! It's just life, that's all! It's just how life is. It's what we've got to put up with. It's all we've got. What gives you the right to decide it's not good enough?''You're in a prison, Evey. You were born in a prison. You've been in a prison so long, you no longer believe there's a world outside. That's because you're afraid, Evey. You're afraid because you can feel freedom closing in upon you. You're afraid because freedom is terrifying. Don't back away from it, Evey. Part of you understands the truth even as part pretends not to. You were in a cell, Evey. They offered you a choice between the death of your principles and the death of your body. You said you'd rather die. You faced the fear of your own death and you were calm and still. The door of the cage is open, Evey. All that you feel is the wind from outside.
Alan Moore
You must be the best judge of your own happiness.
Jane Austen
There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.
C.S. Lewis
The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.
Bertrand Russell
There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol."..."There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality."..."But they used to take morphia and cocaine."..."Two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized in A.F. 178."..."Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug."..."Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant."..."All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects."..."Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology."..."Stability was practically assured.
Aldous Huxley
The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one does.
J.M. Barrie
Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it's been sung? The dance when it's been danced? It's only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but there is something wrong with the picture. Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature's highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and wilfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we're expected! But there is no such place, that's why it's called utopia. The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question. If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.
Tom Stoppard
To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.
Julian Barnes
Certainly the most destructive vice if you like, that a person can have. More than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins - is self pity. Self pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred's a subset of self pity and not the other way around - ' It destroys everything around it, except itself '. Self pity will destroy relationships, it'll destroy anything that's good, it will fulfill all the prophecies it makes and leave only itself. And it's so simple to imagine that one is hard done by, and that things are unfair, and that one is underappreciated, and that if only one had had a chance at this, only one had had a chance at that, things would have gone better, you would be happier if only this, that one is unlucky. All those things. And some of them may well even be true. But, to pity oneself as a result of them is to do oneself an enormous disservice.I think it's one of things we find unattractive about the american culture, a culture which I find mostly, extremely attractive, and I like americans and I love being in america. But, just occasionally there will be some example of the absolutely ravening self pity that they are capable of, and you see it in their talk shows. It's an appalling spectacle, and it's so self destructive. I almost once wanted to publish a self help book saying 'How To Be Happy by Stephen Fry : Guaranteed success'. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages, and the first page would just say - ' Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself - And you will be happy '. Use the rest of the book to write down your interesting thoughts and drawings, and that's what the book would be, and it would be true. And it sounds like 'Oh that's so simple', because it's not simple to stop feeling sorry for yourself, it's bloody hard. Because we do feel sorry for ourselves, it's what Genesis is all about.
Stephen Fry
It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don't know everything.
Alexander McCall Smith
Happy girls are the prettiest
Audrey Hepburn
Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or tortuous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive.
Joanne Harris
The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That's the deal.
C.S. Lewis
A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
John Keats
The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.
Graham Greene
Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.
Daphne du Maurier
All who joy would winMust share it -- Happiness was born a twin.
George Gordon Byron
I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.
Neil Gaiman
There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.
G.K. Chesterton
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
Douglas Adams
I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.
Jane Austen
I am the happiest creature in the world. Perhaps other people have said so before, but not one with such justice. I am happier even than Jane; she only smiles, I laugh.
Jane Austen
When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.
J.M. Barrie
I'd far rather be happy than right any day.
Douglas Adams
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.
Aldous Huxley
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, They danced by the light of the moon.
Edward Lear
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
J.R.R. Tolkien
The Seven Social Sins are: Wealth without work. Pleasure without conscience. Knowledge without character. Commerce without morality. Science without humanity. Worship without sacrifice. Politics without principle.From a sermon given by Frederick Lewis Donaldson in Westminster Abbey, London, on March 20, 1925.
Frederick Lewis Donaldson
Choose your counsel, company and companions wisely: beware seeking wise words of advice from a fool or expecting informed opinions or decisions from the ignorant.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Communication is the breath or death of any relationship
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Inspiration may come from many places but motivation - the love of life, daily drive and the will to thrive - that must come from you from within
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Don't judge a book by its cover.
George Eliot
It's always the mind that needs quietening and the heart that needs listening to.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
There's no beauty without difference and diversity. Love unconditionally.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Anythings possible if you've got enough nerve!!!
J.K. Rowling
Too much time is wasted listening to the noise of the mind - and too little is spent living from the love and power of the heart.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
You are not who you think you are. You are not who they want you to be. You are not merely your colour, class, gender - and so on - these are quite narrow things. You are not the ideas you are given and gather. You are not what you own or lay claim to. You are not even your life story - for that changes through time, perspective, emphasis and many things. You are what resides before, between and beyond all these things." - R. Ogunlaru
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Freedom was my daring travel companion on the thrilling ride of life.
Beth Kempton
We often build our lives in a way that shuts out freedom.
Beth Kempton
Freedom is found within.
Beth Kempton
Nowists get off on getting on, so they run when they could walk, jump when they could sit and dance when they could sit at the edge. They regret inaction, so simply act.
Max McKeown
Friendships - and indeed most relationships - are measured in the closeness of hearts, minds and soul ties... not in the distance of physical miles or even the passing of time.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Freedom is found within, in the shape of our laughter and the way we love, in the truths that we live by and the stories we become
Beth Kempton
Freedom wanders in the landscape of the mind, and nourishes the deepest yearnings of the soul.
Beth Kempton
Feeling free is a choice that is ours for the making, ours for the taking at any time, at any age. 
Beth Kempton
Deep down we all know that freedom is a choice, yet so many of us don’t feel that truth.
Beth Kempton
In finding the courage and confidence to escape our cages and shine, we help others do the same.
Beth Kempton
Your heart knows there is a greater version of your life available to you.
Beth Kempton
The feeling of freedom is as precious as a fortune waiting to be told.
Beth Kempton