Quotes by British Authors - Page 804

When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken.
Benjamin Disraeli
Never stop. Never stop fighting. Never stop dreaming.
Tom Hiddleston
Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.
Malcolm Gladwell
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.
Richard Dawkins
Words save our lives, sometimes.
Neil Gaiman
Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death,And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.
C.S. Lewis
I am what I am, an’ I’m not ashamed. 'Never be ashamed,’ my ol’ dad used ter say, ‘there’s some who’ll hold it against you, but they’re not worth botherin’ with.
J.K. Rowling
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
John Keats
LAW 25Re-Create YourselfDo not accept the roles that society foists on you. Re-create yourself by forging a new identity, one that commands attention and never bores the audience. Be the master of your own image rather than letting others define if for you. Incorporate dramatic devices into your public gestures and actions – your power will be enhanced and your character will seem larger than life.
Robert Greene
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
G.K. Chesterton
Do not dare not to dare.
C.S. Lewis
In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas."Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.
C.S. Lewis
There's a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them.
Philip Pullman
The past can't hurt you anymore. Not unless you let it. They made you into a victim, Evey. They made you into a statistic. But, that's not the real you. That's not who you are inside.
Alan Moore
Normalness leads to sadness.
Phil Lester
I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful.
Stephen Hawking
Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.
Joseph Conrad
What's most important in a friendship? Tolerance and loyalty.
J.K. Rowling
When your will is God's will, you will have your will.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Why are you trying so hard to fit in when you were born to stand out?
Ian Wallace
Your daughter is ugly.She knows loss intimately,carries whole cities in her belly.As a child, relatives wouldn’t hold her.She was splintered wood and sea water.They said she reminded them of the war.On her fifteenth birthday you taught herhow to tie her hair like rope and smoke it over burning frankincense.You made her gargle rosewaterand while she coughed, saidmacaanto girls like you shouldn’t smellof lonely or empty.You are her mother.Why did you not warn her,hold her like a rotting boatand tell her that men will not love herif she is covered in continents,if her teeth are small colonies,if her stomach is an islandif her thighs are borders?What man wants to lay down and watch the world burn in his bedroom? Your daughter’s face is a small riot,her hands are a civil war,a refugee camp behind each ear,a body littered with ugly thingsbut God, doesn’t she wearthe world well.
Warsan Shire
Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.
China Miéville
Life is wasted on the living.
Douglas Adams
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,Or what's a heaven for?
Robert Browning
The most important thing in life is to stop saying 'I wish' and start saying 'I will.' Consider nothing impossible, then treat possiblities as probabilities.
Charles Dickens
It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.
Aldous Huxley
Call him Voldemort, Harry. Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.
J.K. Rowling
If nature has made you for a giver, your hands are born open, and so is your heart; and though there may be times when your hands are empty, your heart is always full, and you can give things out of that—warm things, kind things, sweet things—help and comfort and laughter—and sometimes gay, kind laughter is the best help of all.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. ... In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportmen the cover for the game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them.
John Lubbock
You know what I can't understand? You have all these people telling you all the time how great you are, smart and funny and talented and all that, I mean endlessly, I've been telling you for years. So why don't you believe it? why do you think people say that stuff, Em? Do you think it's a conspiracy, people secretly ganging up to be nice about you?
David Nicholls
If I've learned one lesson from all that's happened to me, it's that there is no such thing as the biggest mistake of your existence. There's no such thing as ruining your life. Life's a pretty resilient thing, it turns out.
Sophie Kinsella
Whatever you think, be sure it is what you think; whatever you want, be sure that is what you want; whatever you feel, be sure that is what you feel.
T.S Eliot
Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.
Neil Gaiman
You must accept the reality of other people. You think that reality is up for negotiation, that we think it's whatever you say it is. You must accept that we are as real as you are; you must accept that you are not God.
J.K. Rowling
In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.
John Bunyan
LAW 4 Always Say Less Than Necessary When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike. Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less. The more you say, the more likely you are to say something foolish.
Robert Greene
Happiness is always there. You just have to choose to see it. There's no point dwelling in the dark and ignoring the light of the stars.
Carrie Hope Fletcher
We can't choose our fate, but we can choose others. Be careful in knowing that.
J.K. Rowling
Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as we understand the theory of relativity and principals of uncertainty. Phenomena that determine the course of our lives. Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it is headed in another. Yesterday, I believe I would never have done what I did today. These forces that often remake time and space, that can shape and alter who weimagine ourselves to be, begin long before we are born and continue after we perish. Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are understood moment to moment. That each point of intersection, each encounter, suggest a new potential direction. Proposition, I have fallen in love with Luisa Rey. Is this possible? I just met her and yet, I feel like something important has happened to me.
David Mitchell
What is now proved was once only imagined.
William Blake
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Charles Darwin
No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Stop feeling sorry for yourself and you will be happy.
Stephen Fry
Besides, the world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters. We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are.
J.K. Rowling
...there ain't no journey what don't change you some.
David Mitchell
I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. He taught me that if you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it at full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.
Roald Dahl
To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it.
Charlie Chaplin
Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest.
Beatrix Potter
My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.
Joseph Conrad
Never, ever, let anyone tell you what you can and can't do. Prove the cynics wrong. Pity them for they have no imagination. The sky's the limit. Your sky. Your limit. Now. Let's dance.
Tom Hiddleston
If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.
T.S Eliot
The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.
John Keats
You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve," said Aslan. "And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content.
C.S. Lewis
The greatest ideas are the simplest.
William Golding
We are all worms, But I do believe that I am a glow worm.
Winston S. Churchill
A creative life cannot be sustained by approval any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.
Will Self
It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.
G.K. Chesterton
We are the music-makers,And we are the dreamers of dreams,Wandering by lone sea-breakers,And sitting by desolate streams.World-losers and world-forsakers,Upon whom the pale moon gleams;Yet we are the movers and shakers,Of the world forever, it seems.
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
I've been lucky. Opportunities don't often come along. So, when they do, you have to grab them.
Audrey Hepburn
There are times when solitude is better than society, and silence is wiser than speech. We should be better Christians if we were more alone, waiting upon God, and gathering through meditation on His Word spiritual strength for labour in his service. We ought to muse upon the things of God, because we thus get the real nutriment out of them. . . . Why is it that some Christians, although they hear many sermons, make but slow advances in the divine life? Because they neglect their closets, and do not thoughtfully meditate on God's Word. They love the wheat, but they do not grind it; they would have the corn, but they will not go forth into the fields to gather it; the fruit hangs upon the tree, but they will not pluck it; the water flows at their feet, but they will not stoop to drink it. From such folly deliver us, O Lord. . . .
Charles Haddon Spurgeon