British Essayist Quotes

Salman Rushdie

Walter Pater

David Irving

Daniel Tammet

Allen Carr

When a person implores you to be reasonable what he means is that you should speed round forthwith to his point of view.

Alice Thomas Ellis

If somebody's trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.

I thought of the infinitely many points that can divide the space between two human hearts.

Reason is necessarily the language of moral, political, and scientific argument: not because reason is holy or on some elevated plane, but because it isn't; because it is accessible to all humans; because, as well as working, it can be seen to work.

I speak of knowledge, sir, which is not the bed-equal of learning... I speak of what comes from learning. I speak of understanding.

A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weather-vane, a windmill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door; a moment - and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again.

It often happens that the quotations constitute the most valuable part of a book.

Much of traditional magic takes place by the light of the Moon. In the night world we are closer to the unconscious, the hidden, that which has yet to be made manifest, that which is suppressed and as yet realized. Past, present, and future are simultaneously one in the realm of the unconscious. Night is when this world and the other world can meet.

Vivianne Crowley

… far greater Advantages would come to pass amongst Christians, if they would cease from Contention, Oppression, and (what tends and disposes them thereunto,) the killing of Beasts, and eating their Flesh and Blood; and in a short time humane murthers, and devilish feuds and cruelties among each other, would abate, and perhaps scarce have a being amongst them.

Philosophical systems? Even the most impressive of them are uncomfortably seated on a throne of rock bottom stupidity, that self-inflicted narrow-mindness which renders a mind capable of believing that it, a part of the immense world, could absolute

I don't think there was any overall Reich policy to kill the Jews. If there was, they would have been killed and there would not be now so many millions of survivors. And believe me, I am glad for every survivor that there was.

To be old is to be part of a huge and ordinary multitude... the reason why old age was venerated in the past was because it was extraordinary.

Patient, dramatic, serious, genial,
From over to over the game goes on,
Weaving a pattern of hardy perennial,
Civilisation under the sun.

Modern man threw a brick through his own window in order to sell himself a burglar alarm.

The more we study mind and matter scientifically the more we see that all things follow a natural sequence, a sequence as liable to work for our disadvantage as for our advantage. It flows like the water of a river, it falls like rain, it is as impartial as the sea. It is as innocent of malice as it is of compassion.