English Author Quotes

A little common sense, goodwill, and a tiny dose of unselfishness could make this goodly earth into an earthly paradise.

Richard Aldington

And if thought and emotion can persist in this way so long after the brain that sent them forth has crumpled into dust, how vitally important it must be to control their very birth in the heart, and guard them with the keenest possible restraint.

Algernon Blackwood

The total and universal want of manners, both in males and females, is... remarkable... that polish which removes the coarser and rougher parts of our nature is unknown and undreamed of.

Frances Trollope

Architecture, can want no commendation, where there are Noble Men, or Noble minds...

Curious wits, not be a slave of one science, or dwell altogether in one subject as most do, but [should] rove abroad, to have an oar in every mans boat, to taste of every dish, and sip of every cup,

A man without decision can never be said to belong to himself.

Maybe we all want to burn off across the horizon, into space, perhaps, to take off into some unknown territory and meet ourselves out there.

Virtues, like essences, lose their fragrance when exposed. They are sensitive plants, which will not bear too familiar approaches.

William Shenstone

For chess, that superb, cold, infinitely satisfying anodyne to life, I feel the ardour of a lover, the humility of a disciple.

H. Russell Wakefield

Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,
And nought is everything and everything is nought.

We must go for a day in the country and when surrounded by the gay twittering of the birds and the smell of the cows I will lay my suit at her feet and he waved his arm wildly at the gay thought.

Salad, I can't bear salad. It grows while you're eating it, you know.

I can pass days
Stretch'd in the shade of those old cedar trees,
Watching the sunshine like a blessing fall,--
The breeze like music wandering o'er the boughs,
Each tree a natural harp,--each different leaf
A different note, blent in one vast thanksgiving.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Ask me no more, where those stars light,
That downwards fall in dead of night;
For in your eyes they sit, and there
Fixed become, as in their sphere.

The ignorant frighten children with ghosts, and the better educated assure them there is no such thing. Our understanding may believe the latter, but our instincts believe the former; so that, out of this education, we retain the terror, and just believe enough to make it very troublesome whenever we are placed in circumstances that awaken it.

Catherine Crowe

I'm hither come, but what d'ye think to say?
A woman's pen presents you with a play:
Who smiling told me I'd be sure to see
That once confirmed, the house would empty be.

Frances Boothby

I've learned over the years that everything is more or less the same amount of work, so you may as well set your sights high and try and do something really cool.

Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronized, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand.

Threadbare his songs seem now, to lettered ken: They were worn threadbare next the hearts of men.

It is frequently of much importance, not to the comfort only, but to the recovery of the patient, that he should be enabled to look upon his Physician as his friend.

Thomas Gisborne

Skullion had little use for contraceptives at the best of times. Unnatural, he called them, and placed them in the lower social category of things along with elastic-sided boots and made-up bow-ties. Not the sort of attire for a gentleman.

For when thy folding-star arising shows
His paly circlet, at his warning lamp
The fragrant hours, and elves
Who slept in buds the day,
And many a nymph who wreathes her brows with sedge
And sheds the fresh'ning dew, and lovelier still,
The pensive pleasures sweet
Prepare thy shadowy car.

William Collins

It takes strength to be proud of yourself and to accept yourself when you know that you have something out of the ordinary about you.

Abigail Tarttelin

To Banbury came I, O profane one!
Where I saw a Puritane-one
Hanging of his cat on Monday
For killing of a mouse on Sunday.

Richard Brathwaite

You are not in charge of the universe; you are in charge of yourself.