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Quotes by British Authors
"You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as you dominant aspiration."
"Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, with takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice."
"I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc, is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditure excludes them."
"Last night I dreamt I ate a ten pound marshmallow. When I woke up the pillow was gone."
"I was delighted to become a popular-culture reference point. I'm still delighted about it actually, and I still find it to be weird."
"It was regarded as a responsibility of the BBC to provide programs which have a broad spectrum of interest, and if there was a hole in that spectrum, then the BBC would fill it."
"I was the kind of person who got bullied and loved the attention of it."
"I think that pretty much every form of fiction (I'd include fantasy, obviously) can actually be a real escape from places where you feel bad, and from bad places. It can be a safe place you go, like going on holiday, and it can be somewhere that, while you've escaped, actually teaches you things you need to know when you go back, that gives you knowledge and armour and tools to change the bad place you were in.So no, they're not escapist. They're escape."
"So he said 'I'm going to chop off the bottom of one of your trouser legs and put it in a library.' I thought 'That's a turn-up for the books.'"
"I don't think a prostitute is more moral than a wife, but they are doing the same thing."
"I've owned more sofas than I've had husbands. Both sag in the end, but I generally fall out of love with the furniture quicker than the men."
"Without drive you will never get anywhere in life."
"I would say colonialism is a wonderful thing. It spread civilization to Africa. Before it they had no written language, no wheel as we know it, no schools, no hospitals, not even normal clothing."
"A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas."
"You are the universe - that's why it shines!"
"I've been a photographer all these years... I haven't been in my own darkroom for 10 years."
"So that is how I ended up with those two titles, I like Accidentally on Purpose better - it is how we work in our trade - is it really an accident, or is there a thread of destiny in there? That was the intention, I am not sure I found out."
"I think the greatest star in American at the moment is Kevin Costner."
"It's when you smell the breeze, taste the salt and feel the waves beneath your feet that you truly know that you are alive."
"It was so quiet that morning in Paris that the heels of my two companions and myself were loud on the deserted pavements. It was a city of shuttered shops, and barred windows, and deserted avenues."
"There's no point pretending to be someone or something we're not."
"The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama."
"When you get just a complete sense of blackness or void ahead of you, that somehow the future looks an impossible place to be, and the direction you are going seems to have no purpose, there is this word despair which is a very awful thing to feel."
"The people of England are the most enthusiastic in the world."
"Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken."
"The greatest problem in the world today is intolerance. Everyone is so intolerant of each other."
"I personally could never come to terms with my label of 'Criminally Insane'. Just because of my violent outbursts in prison, don't mean to say I'm mad. Obviously I had become a disruptive element within the penal system. Uncontrollable! Unpredictable! But that don't make insanity!"
"I know not, sir, whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not, it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life."
"Firstly you must always implicitly obey orders, without attempting to form any opinion of your own regarding their propriety. Secondly, you must consider every man your enemy who speaks ill of your king; and thirdly you must hate a Frenchman as you hate the devil."
"Cynicism is the humour of hatred."
"Well, today, the diocese is more than ever a microcosm."
"Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven."
"It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue."
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