Quotes by British Authors - Page 780

I am the only one of us who brings in any money. the other two cannot make money fortune telling. this is because they only tell the truth, and the truth is not what people want to hear. it is a bad thing and it troubles people, so they do not come back.
Neil Gaiman
The truth must be quite plain, if one could just clear away the litter.
Agatha Christie
I don’t need words, I just need you to come back.” - Taryn
Suzanne Wright
I say what other people only think, and when all the rest of the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears off the plump pasteboard, and shows the bare bones beneath.
Wilkie Collins
One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.
Alain de Botton
Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.
Frederic Raphael
ARTThe world is full of confusion and contradiction. We cannot expect to do anything that is absolutely right. We can only measure rightness by the truth within ourselves. And our own truth will never be quite the same as somebody else's. I wish that I could touch you and be sure that it was the right thing to do. I only want to touch you briefly. Just once so that you will know. We are flesh and blood and full of faults. But we are also full of warmth. The world is full of confusion but there is compassion in its midst. communication via simple touch can transmit so much of us in just one minute. Like a painting or a piece of music. I want to touch your soul. I only wish I could be sure it was the right thing to do.
Jay Woodman
It did not seem odd to Max that what he had imagined about Stumps was really true, because this was exactly how games you made up worked. Of course they were true. In your mind.
Pauline Clarke
He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four.
G.K. Chesterton
A Man who is doing his True Will has the inertia of the Universe to assist him.
Aleister Crowley
Sometimes before your luck can be good,someone else's has to be bad
Maisie Mosco
I see the Christian world like this: we've inherited a divided map of the truth, and each of us has a piece. Our traditions teach us that no one else has a valid map and that our own church's piece shows us all the terrain and roads that exist. In fact, there is much more terrain, more roads, and more truth for us to see if we can accept and read one another's maps, fitting them together to give us a clearer picture of the larger Christian tradition.
Michael Spencer
What's the truth? The truth is what people WANT. Liars are basically idealists, liars are saints and prophets. Jesus was a liar.
Jane Rogers
The Four Noble Truths are pragmatic rather than dogmatic. They suggest a course of action to be followed rather than a set of dogmas to be believed. The four truths are prescriptions for behavior rather than descriptions of reality. The Buddha compares himself to a doctor who offers a course of therapeutic treatment to heal one’s ills. To embark on such a therapy is not designed to bring one any closer to ‘the Truth’ but to enable one’s life to flourish here and now, hopefully leaving a legacy that will continue to have beneficial repercussions after one’s death. (154)
Stephen Batchelor
But to live in ignorance on such a point was impossible.
Jane Austen
My Emma, does not every thing serve to prove more and more the beauty of truth and sincerity in all our dealings with each other?
Jane Austen
There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.
Christopher Hitchens
Privacy is a protection from the unreasonable use of state and corporate power. But that is, in a sense, a secondary thing. In the first instance, privacy is the statement in words of a simple understanding, which belongs to the instinctive world rather than the formal one, that some things are the province of those who experience them and not naturally open to the scrutiny of others: courtship and love, with their emotional nakedness; the simple moments of family life; the appalling rawness of grief. That the state and other systems are precluded from snooping on these things is important - it is a strong barrier between the formal world and the hearth, extended or not - but at root privacy is a simple understanding: not everything belongs to everyone.
Nick Harkaway
The cruelest thing you can do to an artist is tell them their work is flawless when it isn't
Yahtzee Croshaw
Truth on our level is a different thing from truth for the jellyfish.
T.S Eliot
Silence is the mother of truth.
Benjamin Disraeli
A novel must show how the world truly is, how characters genuinely think, how events actually occur. A novel should somehow reveal the true source of our actions.
Kevin Hood
Our true nature is one of innocence and freedom to choose how we live. We need to be brave enough not to give that away. Don't give up on your right to, and sense of, TRUTH, Justice, and GRACE.
Jay Woodman
Beauty is truth, truth beauty
John Keats
To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life., 8 September 1935)
Dorothy L. Sayers
The business man who assumes that this life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth. "Yes, I see, dear; it's about halfway between," Aunt Juley had hazarded in earlier years. No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility
E.M. Forster
I willingly accept Cassandra's fateTo speak the truth, although believed too late.
Anne Killigrew
To be haunted is to glimpse a truth that might best be hidden.
James Herbert
Although the pure truth has never been stated, nevertheless it has never been lost. Its existence does not depend upon human statement but upon human sensitivity. In this it is unlike all other knowledge.
Paul Brunton
Truth does not surround itself with lies.
John Christopher
Good is never accomplished except at the cost of those who do it, truth never breaks through except through the sacrifice of those who spread it.
John Henry Newman
Do you believe in the value of truth, my dear, or don’t you?”“Of course I believe in the truth,” said Rhoda, staring.“Yes, you say that, but perhaps you haven’t thought about it. The truth hurts sometimes – and destroys one’s illusions.”“I’d rather have it all the same.” said Rhoda. “So would I. But I don’t know that we’re wise.”Mrs. Oliver; Rhoda Dawes
Agatha Christie
Bitter though it may be to many, Cadfael concluded, there is no substitute for truth, in this or any case.
Ellis Peters
But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian's lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man's truths - if other men had truths - and he believed it possible that this last lie might see him through to the grave.
Stephen Fry
The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming.
Neil Gaiman
Comments are free but facts are sacred.
C. P. Scott
But keeping secrets is a discipline. I never use to think of myself as a good liar, but after having had some practice I had adopted the prevaricator's credo that one doesn't so much fabricate a lie as marry it. A successful lie cannot be brought into this world and capriciously abandoned; like any committed relationship it must be maintained, and with far more devotion than the truth, which carries on being carelessly true without any help. By contrast, my lie needed me as much as I needed it, and so demanded the constancy of wedlock: Till death do us part.
Lionel Shriver
In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth -- only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.
C.S. Lewis
We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth
Ian McEwan
My mother always says people should be able to take care of themselves, even if they're rich and important.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?''For fun?''Fun!' He pounced on the word. 'Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.
John Fowles
Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking. Would not that same uncluttered mind also see the attempts to reconcile science and religion by disparaging the reduction of the complex to the simple as attempts guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectually dishonest emotion?...Religion closes off the central questions of existence by attempting to dissuade us from further enquiry by asserting that we cannot ever hope to comprehend. We are, religion asserts, simply too puny. Through fear of being shown to be vacuous, religion denies the awesome power of human comprehension. It seeks to thwart, by encouraging awe in things unseen, the disclosure of the emptiness of faith. Religion, in contrast to science, deploys the repugnant view that the world is too big for our understanding. Science, in contrast to religion, opens up the great questions of being to rational discussion, to discussion with the prospect of resolution and elucidation. Science, above all, respects the power of the human intellect. Science is the apotheosis of the intellect and the consummation of the Renaissance. Science respects more deeply the potential of humanity than religion ever can.
Peter Atkins
All idealisation makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity — it is to destroy it.
Joseph Conrad
There are no means of finding what either one person or many can do, but by trying - and no means by which anyone else can discover for them what it is for their happiness to do or leave undone
John Stuart Mill
So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.
Thomas Hardy
The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
Graham Greene
However cozy things seemed, the facts of life were the same. You couldn't escape death: It would get us all in the end.
Rachel Ward
But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.
Arthur C. Clarke
I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it.
Anne Brontë
All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shriveled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut.
Anne Brontë
The truth is the only thing worth having, and, in a civilized life, like ours, where so many risks are removed, facing it is almost the only courageous thing left to do.
Edward Verrall Lucas
What we believe about God is the most important truth we believe, and it's the one truth that does the most to shape us. God is the Sun too bright for us to see. Jesus is the Prism who makes the colors beautiful and comprehensible.
Michael Spencer
She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.
Henry James
On the whole, lying is a cheerful affair. Embellishments are intended to give pleasure. People long to tell you what they imagine you want to hear. They want to amuse you; they want to amuse themselves; they want to show you a good time. This is beyond hospitality. This is art.
Isabel Fonseca
The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
Thomas Henry Huxley
To forgive is wisdom, to forget is genius. And easier. Because it's true. It's a new world every heart beat.
Joyce Cary
There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.
Mary Renault
The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core.
David Mitchell
To speak and act truth with constancy and precision is nearly as difficult, and perhaps as meretorious, as to speak it under intimidation or penalty
John Ruskin