Quotes by British Authors - Page 772

The source of wisdom and power, of love and beauty, is within ourselves, but not within our egos. It is within our consciousness. Indeed, its presence provides us with a conscious contrast which enables us to speak of the ego as if it were something different and apart: it is the true Self whereas the ego is only an illusion of the mind.
Paul Brunton
Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly -- something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates.
George Eliot
No plaque reminds the passer-by of these glories, although there should be one; for those who invent biscuits bring great pleasure to many.
Alexander McCall Smith
What deep wounds ever closed without a scar?The hearts bleed longest, and heals but to wear That which disfigures it.
George Gordon Byron
I almost think there is no wisdom comparable to that of exchanging what is called the realities of life for dreams
Hugh Walpole
In every remote corner of the world there are people like Carl Jones and Don Merton who have devoted their lives to saving threatened species. Very often, their determination is all that stands between an endangered species and extinction.But why do they bother? Does it really matter if the Yangtze river dolphin, or the kakapo, or the northern white rhino, or any other species live on only in scientists' notebooks?Well, yes, it does. Every animal and plant is an integral part of its environment: even Komodo dragons have a major role to play in maintaining the ecological stability of their delicate island homes. If they disappear, so could many other species. And conservation is very much in tune with our survival. Animals and plants provide us with life-saving drugs and food, they pollinate crops and provide important ingredients or many industrial processes. Ironically, it is often not the big and beautiful creatures, but the ugly and less dramatic ones, that we need most.Even so, the loss of a few species may seem irrelevant compared to major environmental problems such as global warming or the destruction of the ozone layer. But while nature has considerable resilience, there is a limit to how far that resilience can be stretched. No one knows how close to the limit we are getting. The darker it gets, the faster we're driving.There is one last reason for caring, and I believe that no other is necessary. It is certainly the reason why so many people have devoted their lives to protecting the likes of rhinos, parakeets, kakapos, and dolphins. And it is simply this: the world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier place without them.
Mark Carwardine
I have tried to teach you the wonders of the spiritual world......I have tried to show how we mortals can attain such wisdom......and I've decided you're a pillock.]
Roger Kettle
Fools, their wisdom weak,are their own enemiesas they go through life,doing evilthat bearsbitter fruit.
Juan Mascaró
We are all small-minded people, creeping about the earth grubbing for our own advantage and making the very mistakes for which we want to humiliate our neighbors.
Helen Simonson
You do not own the molecules. They are stardust. They belong to God. What you do own is your soul. Nobody can take that away from you.
Hugh MacLeod
It is better to listen to a crow that lives in trees than to a learned man who lives only in ideas.
Kate Horsley
Whoever wants the "I" to yield up its mysterious and tremendous secret must stop it from looking perpetually in the mirror, must stop the little ego's fascination with its own image.
Paul Brunton
Books! tis a dull and endless strife:Come, hear the woodland linnet,How sweet his music! on my life,There's more of wisdom in it.
William Wordsworth
Respect yourself and others will come to respect you. That is true about all of us, but especially true about women. That is the meaning of honour.
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Wise men speak only of what they know
J.R.R. Tolkien
What people want, mainly, is to be told by some plausible authority that what they are already doing is right. I don't know know of a quicker way to become unpopular than to disagree.
John Brunner
Don't be cool. Like everything.
Shaky Kane
Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding
Jacob Bronowski
Wisdom with an inheritance is good, but wisdom without an inheritance is better than an inheritance without wisdom.
Anne Bradstreet
You have to be ill if you want to get better.
Colin Firth
For years I've been searching for a homeland, finally I found it in you..
Seja Majeed
The life we’re given is on a thread, so wear it well.
Benny Bellamacina
Confidence that one's impressions are God-given is no guarantee that this is really so, even when they persist and grow stronger through long seasons of prayer. Bible-based wisdom must judge them.
J.I. Packer
Cheap booze is a false economy.
Christopher Hitchens
Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that the apparently more trustworthy sources can lead one astray.
Christopher Hitchens
For this is Wisdom; to love, to liveTo take what fate, or the Gods may give.To ask no question, to make no prayer,To kiss the lips and caress the hair,Speed passion's ebb as you greet its flowTo have, -to hold -and -in time, -let go!
Laurence Hope
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
Isaiah Berlin
And, as always happens, and happens far too soon, the strange and wonderful becomes a memory and a memory becomes a dream. Tomorrow it's gone.
Terry Pratchett
What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?
W Somerset Maugham
One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts- just mere thoughts- are as powerful as electric batteries- as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body. If you let it stay there after it has got you in you may never get over it as long as you live.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
He is beginning to master wisdom when he tries to learn how not to try.
Paul Brunton
Habit rules the unreflecting herd.
William Wordsworth
The very old and the very young have something in common that makes it right that they should be left alone together. Dawn and sunset see stars shining in a blue sky; but morning and midday and afternoon do not, poor things.
Elizabeth Goudge
Talk is free but the wise man chooses when to spend his words.
Neil Gaiman
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
Bertrand Russell
What should I do—how should I act now, this very day . . . What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching murmur which would soon gather distinctness.
George Eliot
What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.
William Blake
What God says is best, indeed is best, though all men in the world are against it. Seeing, then, that God prefers his religion; seeing God prefers a tender conscience; seeing they that make themselves fools for the kingdom of heaven are wisest; and that the poor man that loveth Christ is richer than the greatest man in the world that hates him: Shame, depart, thou art an enemy to my salvation.
John Bunyan
For my own part, I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await others. I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.
C.S. Lewis
Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.
Samuel Johnson
But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day.
Benjamin Disraeli
Whatever you want to be in life, you're training for it right now.
Michael Anderson
Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.
Samuel Johnson
I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more /the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort /to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires /and expires, too soon, too soon /before life itself
Joseph Conrad
She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn't be spoken aloud when you are happy.
Graham Greene
When every situation which life can offer is turned to the profit of spiritual growth, no situation can really be a bad one.
Paul Brunton
Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to hide the bodies of those people I had to kill because they pissed me off!
Sarah Ferguson
Never pause unless you have a reason for it, but when you pause, pause as long as you can.
W Somerset Maugham
It is because of its emptiness that the cup is useful.
Carole Wilkinson
Misfortunes make us wise
Mary Norton
While differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.
Karl R. Popper
It is easy to be wise after the event.
Arthur Conan Doyle
There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, " This is new, and therefore better.
John Brunner
They say you should know your limits and work within them. But how can you really know your limits unless you try to expand them?
Jonathan Cainer
The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.
C.S. Lewis
Ah! how little knowledge does a man acquire in his life. He gathers it up like water, but like water it runs between his fingers, and yet, if his hands be but wet as though with dew, behold a generation of fools call out, 'See, he is a wise man!' Is it not so?
H. Rider Haggard
Everyone's allowed to be in love with the wrong person at some point. In fact, it's a mistake not to be.
Harriet Evans
By the time it came to the edge of the Forest, the stream had grown up, so that it was almost a river, and, being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, “There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.” But all the little streams higher up in the Forest went this way and that, quickly, eagerly, having so much to find out before it was too late.
A.A. Milne
The essence of wisdom is to know when to be doing, and when it's useless even to try
Mary Stewart
Better to shun the bait than struggle in the snare.
William Blake