Quotes by British Authors - Page 83

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God "Thy will be done " and those to whom God says "All right then have it your way."
C.S. Lewis
So often we try to alter circumstances to suit ourselves instead of letting them alter us.
Mother Maribel
In vain our labours are whatsoe'er they be unless God gives the Benediction.
Robert Herrick
To character and success two things contradictory as they may seem must go together-humble dependence and manly independence: humble dependence on God and manly reliance on self.
William Wordsworth
Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good behave yourself and never mind the rest.
Beatrix Potter
People who make some other person part of their job are dangerous.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Coercion. The unpardonable crime.
Dorothy Miller Richardson
It is easy and dismally enervating to think of opposition as merely perverse or actually evil-far more invigorating to see it as essential for honing the mind and as a positive good in itself. For the day that moral issues cease to be fought over is the day the word "human" disappears from the race.
Jill Tweedie
We cannot alter facts but we can alter our ways of looking at them.
Phyllis Bottome
You have striven so hard and so long to compel life. Can't you now slowly change and let life slowly drift into you ... let the invisible life steal into you and slowly possess you.
D.H. Lawrence
It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.
Doris Lessing
Events that are predestined require but little management. They manage themselves. They slip into place while we sleep and suddenly we are aware that the thing we fear to attempt is already accomplished.
Amelia Barr
On earth we have nothing to do with success or results but only with being true to God and for God. Defeat in doing right is nevertheless victory.
Frederick W. Robertson
I began to have an idea of my life not as the slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes but as the gradual discovery and growth of a purpose which I did not know.
Joanna Field
An act of love that fails is just as much a part of the divine life as an act of love that succeeds for love is measured by its own fullness not by its reception.
Harold Loukes
It's astonishing in this world how things don't turn out at all the way you expect them to.
Agatha Christie
Doing what's right is no guarantee against misfortune.
William McFee
On God for all events depend You cannot want when God's your friend. Weigh well your part and do your best Leave to your Maker all the rest.
Nathaniel Cotton
Learn to do thy part and leave the rest to Heaven.
John Henry Cardinal Newman
The only measure of what you believe is what you do. If you want to know what people believe don't read what they write don't ask them what they believe just observe what they do.
Ashley Montagu
Let us act on what we have since we have not what we wish.
Cardinal Newman
Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.
Joseph Conrad
It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit divorced from it they remain barren.
Bertrand Russell
He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence.
William Blake
It is much easier to do and die than it is to reason why.
G. A. Studdert-Kennedy
From the moment of birth we are immersed in action and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.
Alfred North Whitehead
The central problem of our age is how to act decisively in the absence of certainty.
Bertrand Russell
Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.
Dodie Smith
The drama's laws the drama's patrons give. For we that live to please must please to live.
Samuel Johnson
We do not go (to the theatre) like our ancestors to escape from the pressure of reality so much as to confirm our experience of it.
Charles Lamb
Long experience has taught me that in England nobody goes to the theatre unless he or she has bronchitis.
James Agate
The unique thing about Margaret Rutherford is that she can act with her chin alone. Among its many moods I especially cherish the chin commanding the chin in doubt and the chin at bay.
Kenneth Tynan
I know it was wonderful but I don't know how I did it.
Laurence Olivier
Show business is like sex. When it's wonderful it's wonderful. But when it isn't very good it's still all right.
Max Wall
By increasing the size of the keyhole today's playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door.
Peter Ustinov
Actor-manager - one to whom the part is greater than the whole.
Ronald Jeans
I sometimes wish they would swagger more now buy bigger overcoats and wilder hats and retain those traces of make-up that put them outside respectability and keep them rogues and vagabonds which is what at heart - bless 'em - they are.
J.B. Priestley
I sweat. If anything comes easy to me I mistrust it.
Lilli Palmer
A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time then I know it can't be much good.
T.S Eliot
Acting is happy agony.
Alec Guinness
You need three things in the theatre - the play the actors and the audience and each must give something.
Kenneth Haigh
There are some great roles - mostly in Shakespeare's tragedies which no one can play at full strength from beginning to end. One simply hopes that one can hit the peaks as often as one has the strength.
Peggy Ashcroft
In music the punctuation is absolutely strict the bars and the rests are absolutely defined. But our punctuation cannot be quite strict because we have to relate it to the audience. In other words we are continually changing the score.
Ralph Richardson
Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.
Alfred Hitchcock
She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.
Clive James
Film-making has become a kind of hysterical pregnancy.
Richard Lester
Acceptance is the truest kinship with humanity.
G.K. Chesterton
A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.
Kenneth Tynan
The unknown is what it is. And to be frightened of it is what sends everybody scurrying around chasing dreams illusions wars peace love hate all that. Unknown is what it is. Accept that it's unknown and it's plain sailing.
John Lennon
The mind which renounces once and forever a futile hope has its compensations in ever-growing calm.
George R. Gissing
If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.
Hazel Henderson
Happiness comes from within a man from some curious adjustment to life.
Hugh Walpole
For this is wisdom: to live to take what fate or the Gods may give.
Laurence Hope
The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence to be always calm ... to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.
Cyril Connolly
It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored in climate that seem to me the happiest but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both.
T.S Eliot
Life is not always what one wants it to be but to make the best of it as it is is the only way of being happy.
Jennie Jerome Churchill
Adapt or perish now as ever is nature's inexorable imperative.
H.G.Wells
If one has to submit it is wasteful not to do so with the best grace possible.
Winston Churchill
The point... is to dwell upon the brightest parts in every prospect to call off the thoughts when turning upon disagreeable objects and strive to be pleased with the present circumstances.
Abraham Tucker
Buddha's doctrine: Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent... this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering.
Alan Watts