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Quotes by English Authors
"We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts."
"Passionate love, I take it, rarely lasts long, and is very troublesome while it does last. Mutual esteem is very much more valuable."
"We are still so close, David and I. We were at a party the other day at my mum's house and I was sitting on his lap. We're very affectionate. And I looked at him and thought after being married for 11 years! We were the only couple who were even near each other at that party. We're soul mates."
"When I was a child and teenager I read whenever I had the opportunity, but since then I've found it hard to read as much as I'd like, children, work, and pets all providing powerful incentives to escape into a book and a practical reason why I rarely do so."
"Those who are fond of setting things to rights have no great objection to setting them wrong."
"A forced kindness deserves no thanks."
"It is safest to be moderately base - to be flexible in shame, and to be always ready for what is generous, good, and just, when anything is to be gained by virtue."
"But the characteristic that is truly special about our species...[is] our ability to model our world and understand both it and where we fit into its overall scheme."
"True contentment depends not upon what we have; a tub was large enough for Diogenes, but a world was too little for Alexander."
"One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it's prepared to put up with living."
"Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read."
"We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality."
"Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly."
"There is no banquet but some dislike something in it."
"From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life."
"It's astonishing in this world how things don't turn out at all the way you expect them to."
"Murder can sometimes seem justified, but it is murder all the same. You are truthful and clear-minded--face the truth, mademoiselle! Your friend died in the last resort, because she had not the courage to live. We may sympathize with her. We may pity her. But the fact remains--the act was hers--not another."
"Remember, it's as easy to marry a rich woman as a poor woman."
"When we started off it was all nervous energy and we probably played everything twice as fast as we do now."
"The world' is man's experience as it appears to, and is moulded by, his ego. It is that less abundant life, which is lived according to the dictates of the insulated self. It is nature denatured by the distorting spectacles of our appetites and revulsions. It is the finite divorced from the Eternal. It is multiplicity in isolation from its non-dual Ground. It is time apprehended as one damned thing after another. It is a system of verbal categories taking the place of the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars which constitute reality. It is a notion labelled 'God'. It is the Universe equated with the words of our utilitarian vocabulary."
"Fear comes from uncertainty. When we are absolutely certain, whether of our worth or worthlessness, we are almost impervious to fear."
"What you doStill betters what is done. When you speak, sweet.I'ld have you do it ever: when you sing,I'ld have you buy and sell so, so give alms,Pray so; and, for the ordering your affairs,To sing them too: when you do dance, I wish youA wave o' the sea, that you might ever doNothing but that; move still, still so,And own no other function: each your doing,So singular in each particular,Crowns what you are doing in the present deed,That all your acts are queens."
"I never read a book before previewing it; it prejudices a man so."
"I'm shorter, I don't have as many freckles as Ron, and I can't do magic."
"A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions if he is not even ready to wear a wreathe around his head for them."
"A danger foreseen is half avoided."
"I know not if the dark or bright shall be by lot; if that wherein my hopes delight be best or not."
"His soul swayed in a vertigo of moral indecision. He had only to snap the thread of a rash vow made to a villainous society, and all his life could be as open and sunny as the square beneath him. He had, on the other other hand, only to keep his antiquated honour, and be delivered inch by inch into the power of this great enemy of mankind, whose very intellect was a torture-chamber. Whenever he looked down into the square he saw the comfortable policeman, a pillar of common sense and common order. Whenever he looked back at the breakfast-table he saw the President still quietly studying him with big, unbearable eyes."
"No longer mourn for me when I am dead Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled. From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell; Nay, if you read this line, remember not. The hand that writ it; for I love you so, That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, If thinking on me then would make you woe."
"I love criticism just so long as it's unqualified praise."
"I never feel really comfortable unless I am either actually writing or have a story going. I could not stop writing."
"The big gay clubs like Heaven started having mixed nights in the late '80s."
"One of my very greatest fears as a child was being ridiculed in public. And there it was coming true. As a television presenter, I'd been respected. People come up to you in the street and shake your hand and talk to you in a respectful way."
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