Quotes by British Authors - Page 773

The most wonderful and the strongest things in the world, you know, are just the things which no one can see.
Charles Kingsley
the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.
John Stuart Mill
Healey’s First Law Of Holes: When in one, stop digging.
Denis Healey
A wise person does at once, what a fool does at last. Both do the same thing; only at different times.
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
Dreams are the bright creatures of poem and legend, who sport on earth in the night season, and melt away in the first beam of the sun, which lights grim care and stern reality on their daily pilgrimage through the world.
Charles Dickens
The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.
A.S. Byatt
All that sadness. All that anger. It is the smoke that gets into your eyes. If you do not blow it away, how can you hope to see?
Anthony Horowitz
Common sense will nearly always stand you in better stead than a slavish adherence to the conventions.
M.M. Kaye
If I’d stayed there, would I always have been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvelous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.
J.L. Carr
Writing about the unholy is one way of writing about what is sacred.
Clive Barker
Obstacles are those frightening things you see when you take you eyes off your goal.
Henry James
Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.
Alan W. Watts
We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can't do without.
Jerome K. Jerome
I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.
Margaret Thatcher
Affliction is often that thing which prepares an ordinary person for some sort of an extraordinary destiny.
C.S. Lewis
Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.
Terry Pratchett
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
Karl R. Popper
Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together, and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.
Bertrand Russell
And, at such a time, for a few of us there will always be a tugging at the heart—knowing a precious moment had gone and we not there. We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever—the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on belfry floor, a remembered voice, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.
J.L. Carr
I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internal, and double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely mysterious even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike "identity", must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest ("gay", "black", "Muslim", whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity.
Philip Pullman
Because some things are never meant to be anything more than a moment. And that was one of them.
Kevin Brooks
Okay, this is the wisdom. First, time spent on reconnaissanse is never wasted. Second, almost anything can be improved with the addition of bacon. And finally, there is no problem on Earth that can't be ameliorated by a hot bath and a cup of tea.
Jasper Fforde
Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have.
Winston S. Churchill
Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.
Arthur C. Clarke
In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of thecat, although in this case there were three determinate states the catcould be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.
Terry Pratchett
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
William Blake
I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief... I'm not in the business of offending people. I find the books upholding certain values that I think are important, such as life is immensely valuable and this world is an extraordinarily beautiful place. We should do what we can to increase the amount of wisdom in the world.]
Philip Pullman
Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever.
Joe Abercrombie
When in doubt, choose to live.
Terry Pratchett
A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
Alexander Pope
Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting.
John Russell
When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so anti-life, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt. At one point, the old professor says, ‘It’s all in Plato’ — meaning that the physical world we see around us is the crude, shabby, imperfect, second-rate copy of something much better. I want to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritual or the afterlife.]
Philip Pullman
I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.
Isaac Newton
It’s always hard to lose somebody. It leaves a hole in you heart that never grows back.
Kevin Brooks
CHORONZON: I am a dire wolf, prey-stalking, lethal prowler.MORPHEUS: I am a hunter, horse-mounted, wolf-stabbing.CHORONZON: I am a horsefly, horse-stinging, hunter-throwing.MORPHEUS: I am a spider, fly-consuming, eight legged.CHORONZON: I am a snake, spider-devouring, posion-toothed.MORPHEUS: I am an ox, snake-crushing, heavy-footed.CHORONZON: I am an anthrax, butcher bacterium, warm-life destroying.MORPHEUS: I am a world, space-floating, life-nurturing.CHORONZON: I am a nova, all-exploding... planet-cremating.MORPHEUS: I am the Universe -- all things encompassing, all life embracing., Dreamlord?MORPHEUS: I am hope.
Neil Gaiman
Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.
Alfred Tennyson
There is a wisdom of the head, and... there is a wisdom of the heart.
Charles Dickens
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C.S. Lewis
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
J.R.R. Tolkien
There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
J.R.R. Tolkien
As much money and life as you could want! The two things most human beings would choose above all - the trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things that are worst for them.
J.K. Rowling
Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.
A.A. Milne
We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.
Alan W. Watts
Life would be tragic if it weren't funny.
Stephen Hawking
Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish.
Anne Bradstreet
Sometimes one likes foolish people for their folly, better than wise people for their wisdom.
Elizabeth Gaskell
Never, never, never give in!
Winston S. Churchill
Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.
Margaret Drabble
We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.
T.S Eliot
Angry people are not always wise.
Jane Austen
Never laugh at live dragons.
J.R.R. Tolkien
It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.
J.R.R. Tolkien
In this lies Man's true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good.
Bertrand Russell
R.I.P. Jerry LewisYou made us laugh in life. Now you have a chance to make God and all of his angels laugh too.Take care and I shall see you in the next life.
Anthony T.Hincks
Dad?" Jesus asked."Yes, son?" God replied."Do we still have any wrapping paper?" Jesus asked."No, we don't. I used it all to make butterflies," God answered."Butterflies?" Jesus asked bewildered."Yes, butterflies," God said."Why?" Jesus now asked."Well, sometimes there is no rain so that means no rainbows. And then sometimes people walk alone or don't look at other people and so that don't see any smiles either. So I cut up the wrapping paper and made butterflies for the people of Earth to see and look at so they would smile.""That's lovely dad, but what about moths?" Jesus asked."They're just small butterflies," God answered.Jesus laughed, "I love butterflies.""I know," God said as he smiled at his son.
Anthony T.Hincks
The scientific world of the time was in the midst of a terrible ferment, with discoveries and realizations coming at an unseemly rate. To many in the ranks of the conservative and the devout, the new theories of geology and biology were delivering a series of hammer blows to mankind's self-regard. Geologists in particular seemed to have gone berserk, to have thrown off all sense of proper obeisance to their Maker... Mankind, it seemed, was now suddenly rather – dare one say it? – insignificant. He may not have been, as he had eternally supposed, specially created.
Simon Winchester
The less instructed atheist will ask whether God can make a weight so heavy that He cannot lift it, in the happy belief that, whichever answer we give, we shall admit that there is something God cannot do. But the question is literally meaningless: a weight than an omnipotent Being cannot lift is as complete a contradiction in terms as a four-sided triangle. In either case the words are English, but do not mean anything because they cancel each other out. There is no point in piling together a lot of words, regardless of their meaning, and then asking triumphantly: 'Can God make that?' God can do anything, but a contradiction in terms is not a thing at all. It is nothing. God Himself could not make a four-sided triangle or a weight that Almighty power could not lift. They are inconceivable, they are nothing; and nothing--to give a slightly different emphasis to Scripture--is impossible to God.
Frank Sheed
If you take each step, as if it was your last. You would appreciate the world in all its glory and bask in the glory of god for in his wisdom he created us and the universe all around us.
Anthony T.Hincks
But I have believed always and taught always that what God demands from man is his utmost effort to cooperate and understand. I have taught the imagination, first and most; I have made knowledge, knowledge of what man is and what man's world is and what man may be, which is the adventure of mankind, the substance of all my teaching.
H.G.Wells
While the Gods are powerful, we learn little about them. It is only in their day of decadence that a strong light beats into heaven.
E.M. Forster