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Quotes by English Authors
"She was wishing that whatever stage of her life she was in now could be got through quickly, for it was seeing to her interminable. If life had to be looked at in terms of high moments. or peaks, then nothing had 'happened' to her for a long time; snd she could look forward to nothing much but a dwindling away from full household activity into getting old."
"In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies;All quit their sphere and rush into the skies.Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes, Men would be angels, angels would be gods. Aspiring to be gods, if angels fell, Aspiring to be angels, men rebel."
"Therefore if a man look sharply and attentively, he shall see Fortune; for though she be blind, yet she is not invisible."
"We can't be as good as we'd want to, so the question then becomes, how do we cope with our own badness?"
"In very different ways, the possibility that the universe is teeming with life, and the opposite possibility that we are totally alone, are equally exciting. Either way, the urge to know more about the universe seems to me irresistible, and I cannot imagine that anybody of truly poetic sensibility could disagree."
"Do not all charms fly / At the mere touch of cold philosophy?"
"I must indeed abide the Doom of Men whether I will or nill: the loss and the silence. But I say to you, King of the Numenoreans, not till now have I understood the tale of your people and their fall. As wicked fools I scorned them, but I pity them at last. For if this is indeed, as the Elves say, the gift of the One to Men, it is bitter to receive."
"If every one is left to judge of his own religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is wrong; but if they are to judge of each other's religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is right; and therefore all the world is right, or all the world is wrong."
"It's despair at the lack of (I'm cheating, I didn't say all these things - but I'm going to write what I want to say as well as what I did) feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world."
"This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them."
"The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'."
"Parenthood is not an object of appetite or even desire. It is an object of will. There is no appetite for parenthood; there is only a purpose or intention of parenthood."
"IV The bounded is loathed by its possessor. The same dull round even of a universe would soon become a mill with complicated wheels.V If the many become the same as the few, when possess'd, More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul, less than All cannot satisfy Man.VI If any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot.VII The desire of Man being Infinite the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite."
"He wouldn't hear of anybody's paying taxes, though he was very patriotic."
"The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane."
"Simple. I got very bored and depressed, so I went and plugged myself in to its external computer feed. I talked to the computer at great length and explained my view of the Universe to it," said Marvin."And what happened?" pressed Ford."It committed suicide," said Marvin and stalked off back to the Heart of Gold."
"Feedback is a pleasant thing. I get a lot of letters from unexpected people in unexpected places."
"Heresies are experiments in man's unsatisfied search for truth."
"Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke."
"We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too."
"One truth is clear Whatever is is right."
"I have a hundred times heard him say, that all ages and nations have represented their gods as wicked, in a constantly increasing progression; that mankind have gone on adding trait after trait till they reached the most perfect conception of wickedness which the human mind could devise, and have called this God, and prostrated themselves before it."
"There is no reason to assume that the universe has the slightest interest in intelligence-or even in life. Both may be random accidental by-products of its operations like the beautiful patterns on a butterfly's wings. The insect would fly just as well without them."
"Fear gives sudden instincts of skill."
"But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it."
"There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle."
"When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less."
"When she removed my hand from her chest for the one hundred thousandth time. Attack and defense, invasion and repulsion... it was as if breasts were little pieces of property that had been unlawfully annexed by the opposite sex - they were rightfully ours and we wanted them back."
"And uh, forget the money. Because, if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life wasting your time. You will be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is, in order to do things you don't like doing, which is stupid. Better to have a short life that is full of things you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way."
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