Quotes · Skopia

68 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Medium·Short story✕clear

The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.

1953

★ 0.9

Short story · Magazine · Detective fiction

We are dealing with an exceptionally astute and dangerous man...one of the most unscrupulous rascals that Australia has ever evolved—and for a young country it has turned out some very finished types.

Arthur Conan Doyle

The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax · 1911

★ 1.0

What a silly thing Love is!...It is not half as useful as Logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true.

1888

★ 1.1

More men are killed by overwork than the importance of this world justifies.

Rudyard Kipling

The Phantom Rickshaw · 1888

★ 1.2

Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications.

1891

★ 1.2

Short story · Magazine · Detective fiction

The lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.

Arthur Conan Doyle

The Adventure of the Copper Beeches · 1892

★ 1.2

He had read Shakespeare and found him weak in chemistry.

1894

★ 1.2

If a book is well written, I always find it too short.

1817

★ 1.3

Short story · Magazine

Buildings will collapse, power plants will stop generating electricity. Generals will drop atomic bombs on their own populations. Mad revolutionaries will run in the streets, crying fantastic slogans. I have often thought that it would begin in New York. This metropolis has all the symptoms of a mind gone berserk.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

The New Yorker · 1968

★ 1.7

Conversation... Is the art of never appearing a bore, of knowing how to say everything interestingly, to entertain with no matter what, to be charming with nothing at all.

Guy de Maupassant

1876

★ 1.8

And the sun sank again on the grand Australian bush-the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, the home of the weird, and of much that is different from things in other lands.

The Bush Undertaker · 1892

★ 1.8

It may be that there is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.

1946

★ 1.8

Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction...For fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it.

G.K. Chesterton

1905

★ 1.9

Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.

1905

★ 1.9

If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they'd never marry.

1906

★ 1.9

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.

1907

★ 1.9

There's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time.

1908

★ 1.9

It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.

1910

★ 1.9

What with excellent browsing and sluicing and cheery conversation and what-not, the afternoon passed quite happily.

1916

★ 1.9

The body, she says, is subject to the forces of gravity. But the soul is ruled by levity, pure.

1984

★ 1.9

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