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Quotes by English Authors
"Words are the counters of wise men, and the money of fools."
"There is no surer mark of the absence of the highest moral and intellectual qualities than a cold reception of excellence."
"There is an unnatural unfitness in an aristocracy to be legislators for a nation. Their ideas of distributive justice are corrupted at the very source. They begin life trampling on all their younger brothers and sisters, and relations of every kind, and are taught and educated so to do. With what ideas of justice or honor can that man enter a house of legislation, who absorbs in his own person the inheritance of a whole family of children, or metes out some pitiful portion with the insolence of a gift?"
"The way to get on in the world is to be neither more nor less wise, neither better nor worse than your neighbours."
"Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper."
"Many come to bring their clothes to church rather than themselves."
"I've never responded well to entrenched negative thinking."
"What do you consider the most interesting man-made structure in the galaxy?The dam they are building at the Three Gorges on the Yangtse. Though perhaps '"baffling'" would be a better word. Dams almost never do what they were intended to do, but create devastation beyond belief. And yet we keep on building them, and I can''t help but wonder why. I''m convinced that if we go back far enough in the history of the human species, we will find some beaver genes creeping in there somewhere. It''s the only explanation that makes sense."
"Doubt comes in at the window when inquiry is denied at the door."
"Because if we the storytellers don't do this, then the bad people will win."
"Children don't need much advice but they really do need to be listened to and not just with half an ear."
"I used to suffer from excessive pride. Well, I got over that one."
"What cannot be repaired is not to be regretted."
"The more 'life' a story has the more readily will it be susceptible of allegorical interpretations: while the better a deliberate allegory is made the more nearly will it be acceptable just as a story."
"All causes shall give way: I am in bloodStepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,Returning were as tedious as go o'er."
"If you consulted your business experiences instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter."
"The essence of the charge made against the modern high-status ideal is that it is guilty of effecting a gigantic distortion of priorities, of elevating to the highest level of achievement a process of material accumulation that should instead be only one of many factors determining the direction of our lives under a more truthful, more broadly defined conception of ourselves."
"We shall not flag or fail. We shall fight in France we shall fight on the seas and oceans we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air we shall defend our island whatever the cost may be we shall fight on the beaches we shall fight on the landing grounds we shall fight in the fields and in the streets we shall fight in the hills we shall never surrender."
"The amateur is very rare in French literature - as rare as he is common in our own."
"A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it."
"I like working with people. I believe change can only come through collaboration."
"We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances."
"Everything that has existed, lingers in the Eternity."
"I think I'm finally growing up - and about time."
"Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity."
"If per capita was a problem, decapita could be arranged."
"Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post as soon as there is no enemy in the field."
"Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory; nothing can come of nothing."
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