Quotes by British Authors - Page 789

Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.
Alan W. Watts
In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big – ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.
Terry Eagleton
For axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses.
John Keats
Give love, take pride
Benny Bellamacina
William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was: "A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.
Bertrand Russell
La filosofía nos enseña a sentir incertidumbre ante las cosas que nos parecen evidentes. La propaganda, en cambio, nos enseña a aceptar como evidentes cosas sobre las que sería razonable suspender nuestro juicio o sentir dudas.
Aldous Huxley
She had lost herself in this old work, her personality dissolving into it, so that she had been set free. The immortality of the soul lies in its dissolution; this was the cryptic comment that so frustrated Olivier and which Julien had only ever grasped as evidence for the history of a particular school of thought. He had known all about its history, but Julia knew what it meant. He found the realization strangely reassuring.
Iain Pears
How keen everyone is to make this world their home forgetting its impermanence It's like trying to see and name constellations in a fireworks display.
Nadeem Aslam
If those at your top are weak, your bottom will be rotten
Benny Bellamacina
The scepticism which men affect towards their higher inspirations is often not an honest doubt, but a guilty negligence, and is a sign of narrow mind and defective wisdom.
James Martineau
This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.
Jacob Bronowski
I believe in spectacles, but I think eyes necessary too.
John Stuart Mill
religion, the most powerful of the elements which have entered into the formation of moral feeling, having almost always been governed either by the ambition of a hierarchy, seeking control over every department of human conduct, or by the spirit of Puritanism.
John Stuart Mill
...the fundamental things in a man are not the things he explains, but rather the things he forgets to explain.
G.K. Chesterton
Lifes like a painters palette, just when you've got everything worked out the colours change
Benny Bellamacina
Sometimes the only way to succeed is to fail backwards
Benny Bellamacina
Giving is the only way of taking part
Benny Bellamacina
When you can't get what you want, get what you need
Benny Bellamacina
If your dreams are to hard to achieve, just achieve
Benny Bellamacina
An over examination of life can deter you from life itself
Ilyas Kassam
An intelligent man is one who acknowledges his intelligence as that of those who surround him.
Ilyas Kassam
If chance be the Father of all flesh, Disaster is his rainbow in the sky, And when you hear State of Emergency! Sniper Kills Ten! Troops on Rampage! Whites go Looting! Bomb Blasts School! It is but the sound of man worshiping his maker.
Steve Turner
There are two ways of constructing a piece of software: One is to make it so simple that there are obviously no errors, and the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious errors.
Tony Hoare
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
George Orwell
There is desire in the perfect, beauty in the imperfect.Thus I lust over the flawless,and fall amorously forceless to the flawed.
Ilyas Kassam
Logic in all its infinite potential, is the most dangerous of vices. For one can always find some form of logic to justify his action, and rest comfortably in the assurance, that what he did abides by reason. That is why, for us brittle beings, Intention is the only true weapon of peace.
Ilyas Kassam
The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.
John Stuart Mill
If by any chance a playwright wishes to express a political opinion or a moral opinion or a philosophy, he must be a good enough craftsman to do it with so much spice of entertainment in it that the public get the message without being aware of it.
Noël Coward
Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy.
Bertrand Russell
Love will never let you down, if you don't give it up
Benny Bellamacina
Want less, live more
Benny Bellamacina
When you’ve tried everything and failed, try everything else and succeed
Benny Bellamacina
You can change your mind, don't let your mind change you
Benny Bellamacina
Humanity must forgive 'Humanity', for only then can we be Humane.
Ilyas Kassam
It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion.
Bertrand Russell
If you change who you are to suit other people, you may end up dressed for the wrong occasion
Benny Bellamacina
There isn't an end point to excellence where you have it and you can stop. Being your best self means keeping on trying.
Jo Walton
You don't need to look at the beauty to feel the love.
Anthony T.Hincks
Aestheticism and radicalism must lead us to jettison reason, and to replace it by a desperate hope for political miracles. This irrational attitude which springs from intoxication with dreams of a beautiful world is what I call Romanticism. It may seek its heavenly city in the past or in the future; it may preach ‘back to nature’ or ‘forward to a world of love and beauty’; but its appeal is always to our emotions rather than to reason. Even with the best intentions of making heaven on earth it only succeeds in making it a hell – that hell which man alone prepares for his fellow-men.
Karl R. Popper
The theological perspective of participation actually saves the appearances by exceeding them. It recognizes that materialism and spiritualism are false alternatives, since if there is only finite matter there is not even that, and that for phenomena really to be there they must be more than there. Hence, by appealing to an eternal source for bodies, their art, language, sexual and political union, one is not ethereally taking leave of their density. On the contrary, one is insisting that behind this density resides an even greater density – beyond all contrasts of density and lightness (as beyond all contrasts of definition and limitlessness). This is to say that all there is only is because it is more than it is. (...)This perspective should in many ways be seen as undercutting some of the contrasts between theological liberals and conservatives. The former tend to validate what they see as the modern embrace of our finitude – as language, and as erotic and aesthetically delighting bodies, and so forth. Conservatives, however, seem still to embrace a sort of nominal ethereal distancing from these realities and a disdain for them. Radical orthodoxy, by contrast, sees the historic root of the celebration of these things in participatory philosophy and incarnational theology, even if it can acknowledge that premodern tradition never took this celebration far enough. The modern apparent embrace of the finite it regards as, on inspection, illusory, since in order to stop the finite vanishing modernity must construe it as a spatial edifice bound by clear laws, rules and lattices. If, on the other hand, following the postmodern options, it embraces the flux of things, this is an empty flux both concealing and revealing an ultimate void. Hence, modernity has oscillated between puritanism (sexual or otherwise) and an entirely perverse eroticism, which is in love with death and therefore wills the death also of the erotic, and does not preserve the erotic as far as an eternal consummation. In a bizarre way, it seems that modernity does not really want what it thinks it wants; but on the other hand, in order to have what it thinks it wants, it would have to recover the theological. Thereby, of course, it would discover also that that which it desires is quite other than it has supposed
John Milbank
The progress of the world can certainly never come at all save by the modified action of the individual beings who compose the world.
George Eliot
If we try to measure Now, we find it's always gone, has become part of the past.
Aidan Chambers
We are the lucky ones for we shall die, as there is an infinite number of possible forms of DNA all but a few billions of which will never burst into consciousness.
Frank Close
If I could put it into a very few words, dear sir, I should say that our prevalent belief is in moderation. We inculcate the virtue of avoiding excesses of all kinds—even including, if you will pardon the paradox, excess of virtue itself.
James Hilton
I would rather be an opportunist and float than go to the bottom with my principles around my neck.
Stanley Baldwin
Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
If the moment is everthing, then everything is time.
Benny Bellamacina
Death is never an excuse to stop living.
Catherine Johnson
For where is the man that has incontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all he condemns; or can say that he has examined to the bottom all his own, or other men's opinions? The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves than constrain others.
John Locke
[People] ask themselves, what is suitable for my position? What is usually done by persons of my station and percuniary circumstances? Or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary in preference to what suits their own inclinations. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things that are commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own.
John Stuart Mill
Love delayed is lust augmented.
Louis de Bernières
[T]he concern of man is not his future but his present, not the world but his soul. We must be just, we must strive, we must engage ourselves with the business of the world for our own sake, because through that, and through contemplation in equal measure, our soul is purified and brought closer to the divine. ... Thought and deed conjoined are crucial. ... The attempt must be made; the outcome is irrelevant. Right action is a pale material reflection of the divine, but reflection it is, nonetheless. Define your goal and exert reason to accomplish it by virtuous action; successs or failure is secondary.
Iain Pears
The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Action is the activity of the rational soul, which abhors irrationality and must combat it or be corrupted by it. When it sees the irrationality of others, it must seek to correct it, and can do this either by teaching or engaging in public affairs itself, correcting through its practice. And the purpose of action is to enable philosophy to continue, for if men are reduced to the material alone, they become no more than beasts.
Iain Pears
Civilization is only possible for deeply unpleasant animals. It is only an ape that can be truly civilized.
Mark Rowlands
...even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.
G.K. Chesterton
When the road ahead seems impossible, start the engine
Benny Bellamacina
Of course there’s a risk that that could happen, but what is the alternative? To never allow myself to get close to anyone ever again? Never know the joy of loving someone for fear that it could end up in tears? My heart might stay safe, but it wouldn’t be much of a life.
Chantelle Shaw
I believe that just because something didn’t go the way you planned it once, it’s no reason not to try again.
Chantelle Shaw
Men would no longer be victims of nature or of their own largely irrational societies: reason would triumph; universal harmonious cooperation, true history, would at last begin. For if this was not so, do the ideas of progress, of history, have any meaning? Is there not a movement, however tortuous, from ignorance to knowledge, from mythical thought and childish fantasies to perception of reality face to face, to knowledge of true goals, true values as well as truths of fact? Can history be a mere purposeless succession of events, caused by a mixture of material factors and the play of random selection, a tale full of sound and fury signifying nothing? This was unthinkable. The day would dawn when men and women would take their lives in their own hands and not be self-seeking beings or the playthings of blind forces that they did not understand. It was, at the very least, not impossible to conceive that such an earthly paradise could be; and if conceivable we could, at any rate, try to march towards it. That has been at the centre of ethical thought from the Greeks to the Christian visionaries of the Middle Ages, from the Renaissance to progressive thought in the last century; and indeed, is believed by many to this day.
Isaiah Berlin