Quotes by British Authors - Page 782

If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.
Neil Gaiman
Every impulse of feeling should be guided by reason; and, in my opinion, exertion should always be in proportion to what is required.
Jane Austen
Integrity is a bugger, it really is. Lying can get you into difficulties, but to really wind up in the crappers try telling nothing but the truth.
David Mitchell
Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.
G.K. Chesterton
In fact, the truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?
Virginia Woolf
It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.
George Eliot
For those who like that sort of thing," said Miss Brodie in her best Edinburgh voice, "That is the sort of thing they like.
Muriel Spark
Everything he had ever done that had been better left undone. Every lie he had told — told to himself, or told to others. Every little hurt, and all the great hurts. Each one was pulled out of him, detail by detail, inch by inch. The demon stripped away the cover of forgetfulness, stripped everything down to truth, and it hurt more than anything.
Neil Gaiman
I think there's a difference between (a) offending people for its own sake, which I don't necessarily want to do, because some people are good and decent and it would be unkind to upset them simply to indulge my own self-importance, and (b) challenging their prejudices, their preconceptions, or their comfortable assumptions. I'm very happy to do that. But we need to be on our guard when people say they're offended. No one actually has the right to go through life without being offended. Some people think they can say "such-and-such offends me" and that will stop the "offensive" words or behaviour and force the "offender" to apologise. I'm very much against that tactic. No one should be able to shut down discussion by making their feelings more important than the search for truth. If such people are offended, they should put up with it.
Philip Pullman
Do you want this to be a love story?
Jenny Downham
Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant.
W Somerset Maugham
We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.
Alain de Botton
Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth. It possesses these two aspects, the evil one of the two appealing to people capable of naïve hatred; but what is actually happening is that when you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water. It doesn't seem to matter much which sect you have, for both types occur in all sects....
Alfred North Whitehead
Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.
Zadie Smith
All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.
George Orwell
For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth".
A.S. Byatt
Truth! Freedom! Justice! And a hard-boiled egg!
Terry Pratchett
The truth between two people always cuts two ways.
Diana Wynne Jones
He was always seeking for a meaning in life, and here it seemed to him that a meaning was offered; but it was obscure and vague . . . He saw what looked like the truth as by flashes of lightening on a dark, stormy night you might see a mountain range. He seemed to see that a man need not leave his life to chance, but that his will was powerful; he seemed to see that self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion; he seemed to see that the inward life might be as manifold, as varied, as rich with experience, as the life of one who conquered realms and explored unknown lands.
W Somerset Maugham
Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.
Jeanette Winterson
When i tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do.
William Blake
In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.
Zadie Smith
I shouldn't believe anything I say, if I were you-and that includes what I just told you.
Jasper Fforde
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
Aldous Huxley
An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man's mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut. He can say nothing to the purpose. Outside the Tao there is no ground for criticizing either the Tao or anything else.
C.S. Lewis
Her last conscious thought was disgust at life; her senses had lied to her. The world was not made of energy and delight but of foulness, betrayal, and lassitude. Living was hateful, and death was no better, and from end to end of the universe this was the first and last and only truth.
Philip Pullman
Michael: There's nothing here to fear.Lucifer: Well, there's always the truth.
Mike Carey
The devil’s agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not?
Arthur Conan Doyle
After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth', and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Once in a while it really hits people that they don't have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.
Alan Keightley
There is an inmost center in us all, where truth abides in fullness;....and, to know, rather consists in opening out a way where the imprisoned splendor may escape, then in effecting entry for a light supposed to be without.
Robert Browning
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.
George Orwell
Let's say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says maybe 100,000. Richard Dawkins thinks maybe a quarter-of-a-million. I'll take 100,000. In order to be a Christian, you have to believe that for 98,000 years, our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25 years, dying of their teeth. Famine, struggle, bitterness, war, suffering, misery, all of that for 98,000 years.Heaven watches this with complete indifference. And then 2000 years ago, thinks 'That's enough of that. It's time to intervene,' and the best way to do this would be by condemning someone to a human sacrifice somewhere in the less literate parts of the Middle East. Don't lets appeal to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilization. Let's go to the desert and have another revelation there. This is nonsense. It can't be believed by a thinking person.Why am I glad this is the case? To get to the point of the wrongness of Christianity, because I think the teachings of Christianity are immoral. The central one is the most immoral of all, and that is the one of vicarious redemption. You can throw your sins onto somebody else, vulgarly known as scapegoating. In fact, originating as scapegoating in the same area, the same desert. I can pay your debt if I love you. I can serve your term in prison if I love you very much. I can volunteer to do that. I can't take your sins away, because I can't abolish your responsibility, and I shouldn't offer to do so. Your responsibility has to stay with you. There's no vicarious redemption. There very probably, in fact, is no redemption at all. It's just a part of wish-thinking, and I don't think wish-thinking is good for people either.It even manages to pollute the central question, the word I just employed, the most important word of all: the word love, by making love compulsory, by saying you MUST love. You must love your neighbour as yourself, something you can't actually do. You'll always fall short, so you can always be found guilty. By saying you must love someone who you also must fear. That's to say a supreme being, an eternal father, someone of whom you must be afraid, but you must love him, too. If you fail in this duty, you're again a wretched sinner. This is not mentally or morally or intellectually healthy.And that brings me to the final objection - I'll condense it, Dr. Orlafsky - which is, this is a totalitarian system. If there was a God who could do these things and demand these things of us, and he was eternal and unchanging, we'd be living under a dictatorship from which there is no appeal, and one that can never change and one that knows our thoughts and can convict us of thought crime, and condemn us to eternal punishment for actions that we are condemned in advance to be taking. All this in the round, and I could say more, it's an excellent thing that we have absolutely no reason to believe any of it to be true.
Christopher Hitchens
What are heavy? sea-sand and sorrow.What are brief? today and tomorrow.What are frail? spring blossoms and youth.What are deep? the ocean and truth.
Christina Rossetti
I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.
Diane Setterfield
A thing can be true and still be desperate folly, Hazel.
Richard Adams
A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on.
Terry Pratchett
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.
George Orwell
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!
George Orwell
Tis strange,-but true; for truth is always strange;Stranger than fiction: if it could be told,How much would novels gain by the exchange!How differently the world would men behold!
George Gordon Byron
Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.
E.M. Forster
A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
Arthur C. Clarke
Truthfulness so often goes with ruthlessness.
Dodie Smith
Everything is permitted, Nothing is true.
Oliver Bowden
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.
Winston S. Churchill
It takes a certain ingenuous faith - but I have it - to believe that people who read and reflect more likely than not come to judge things with liberality and truth.
A.C. Grayling
If only they would all just leave me alone with my books and my letters, I would be content to let life, and the world pass me by
Alison Weir
To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.
John Locke
All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.
Diane Setterfield
You speak from your heart, young Firepaw. This will make you a stronger warrior one day." said LionheartTigerclaw growled. "Or it might make him give in to kittypet weakness right at the moment of attack
Erin Hunter
Actors in any capacity, artists of any stripe, are inspired by their curiosity, by their desire to explore all quarters of life, in light and in dark, and reflect what they find in their work. Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.
Tom Hiddleston
There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one.
C.S. Lewis
The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.
Terry Pratchett
I cannot love a man who cannot protect me.
Anne Brontë
Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
Isaac Newton
Proof is boring. Proof is tiresome. Proof is an irrelevance. People would far rather be handed an easy lie than search for a difficult truth, especially if it suits their own purposes.
Joe Abercrombie
Apparently people don't like the truth, but I do like it; I like it because it upsets a lot of people. If you show them enough times that their arguments are bullshit, then maybe just once, one of them will say, 'Oh! Wait a minute - I was wrong.' I live for that happening. Rare, I assure you
Lemmy Kilmister
It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.
Neil Gaiman
I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness.
Aldous Huxley