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Quotes by English Authors
"Keeping an active mind has been vital to my survival, as has been maintaining a sense of humor."
"And like most people who have spent much of their adult life being emotionally dishonest, I overcalculated the sympathy a final being honest would bring."
"Woman's at best a contradiction still."
"Cottage of content was better than the Palace of cold splendour, and that where love was, all was."
"It's better to be quotable than to be honest."
"There are some frauds so well conducted that it would be stupidity not to be deceived by them."
"Enthusiasm is that temper of the mind in which the imagination has got the better of the judgment."
"Fear is the tax that conscience pays to guilt."
"I'm quite into listening to music and not doing anything else."
"Faerie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold...The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost."
"Anybody who enjoys being in the House of Commons probably needs psychiatric help."
"Wonder, connected with a principle of rational curiosity, is the source of all knowledge and discover, and it is a principle even of piety; but wonder which ends in wonder, and is satisfied with wonder, is the quality of an idiot."
"If you meet a number of failures the causes of which are not known, look for something that is common for each failure and that is never present when there is a success."
"In the next place, wonderful as it seems in a sexual world, the Martians were absolutely without sex, and therefore without any of the tumultuous emotions that arise..."
"The music we made then was so amateurish, compared to the rest of mainstream pop or rock and roll. But what differentiated us from what everybody else was doing in the business was the fact that you could tell that these people came from different reference areas."
"The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists."
"Long ago I decided that at a political meeting the truth usually comes out in just such a speech or a remark ignored at the time because its tone is not that of the meeting. Humorous, or satirical, or even angry or bitter - yet it's the truth, and all the long speeches and contributions are nonsense."
"I don't have much positive to say about motor neuron disease, but it taught me not to pity myself because others were worse off, and to get on with what I still could do. I'm happier now than before I developed the condition."
"Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now."
"It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone."
"Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."
"Good Christian people, I am come hither to die, for according to the law, and by the law I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it. I am come hither to accuse no man, nor to speak anything of that, whereof I am accused and condemned to die."
"Adventures do occur, but not punctually."
"There's no such thing as lack of confidence. You either have it or you don't."
"My business is not to show anybody anything; my job is just to do it."
"I don't think I really saw people except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understand, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young."
"All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place."
"To practice with an end in view is to have one eye on the practice and the other on the end, which is lack of concentration, lack of sincerity."
"It's hard to be done a favor by a man you hate. It's hard to hate him so much afterwards. Losing an enemy can be worse than losing a friend, if you've had him for long enough."
"Surely there comes a time when counting the cost and paying the price aren't things to think about any more. All that matters is value - the ultimate value of what one does."
"Posthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness when bequeathed by those who, even alive, would part with nothing."
"Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound."
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