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Oscar Wilde24 quotes
Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed. — Oscar Wilde · 1890Genius lasts longer than Beauty. — Oscar Wilde · 1890It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution. — Oscar Wilde · 1890The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. — Oscar Wilde · 1890To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. — Oscar Wilde · 1891A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. — Oscar Wilde · 1890All 24 quotes →Arthur Conan Doyle15 quotes
There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion. It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers. — Arthur Conan Doyle · 1893How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? — Arthur Conan Doyle · 1890It is cocaine...a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it? — Arthur Conan Doyle · 1890You see, but you do not observe. — Arthur Conan Doyle · 1891It is quite a three-pipe problem, and I beg that you won't speak to me for fifty minutes. — Arthur Conan Doyle · 1891It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important. — Arthur Conan Doyle · 1891All 15 quotes →Henry Wadsworth Longfellow9 quotes
One, if by land, and two, if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · 1861Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · 1838Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · 1838His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns whate'er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · 1840Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · 1838Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · 1838All 9 quotes →Albert Einstein7 quotes
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. — Albert Einstein · 1930Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind. — Albert Einstein · 1929Imagination is more important than knowledge. — Albert Einstein · 1929As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable. — Albert Einstein · 1945Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value. — Albert Einstein · 1955A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving. — Albert Einstein · 1930All 7 quotes →James Joyce7 quotes
He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. — James Joyce · 1915His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or reverie, he had heard their tale before. — James Joyce · 1915Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not. — James Joyce · 1915It is a curious thing, do you know, Cranly said dispassionately, how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve. — James Joyce · 1915I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile and cunning. — James Joyce · 1915When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets. — James Joyce · 1915All 7 quotes →Henry James6 quotes
Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. — Henry James · 1884We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. — Henry James · 1893The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his—attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park. — Henry James · 1881Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had? — Henry James · 1903Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. — Henry James · 1881The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life. — Henry James · 1884Thomas Babington Macaulay6 quotes
The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm. — Thomas Babington Macaulay · 1828With the dead there is no rivalry. In the dead there is no change. Plato is never sullen. Cervantes is never petulant. Demosthenes never comes unseasonably. Dante never stays too long. No difference of political opinion can alienate Cicero. No heresy can excite the horror of Bossuet. — Thomas Babington Macaulay · 1837The history of England is emphatically the history of progress. — Thomas Babington Macaulay · 1835She thoroughly understands, what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts. — Thomas Babington Macaulay · 1840The English Bible,— a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power. — Thomas Babington Macaulay · 1828We have heard it said that five per cent is the natural interest of money. — Thomas Babington Macaulay · 1830Bertrand Russell4 quotes
The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. — Bertrand Russell · 1932Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. — Bertrand Russell · 1932Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. — Bertrand Russell · 1907Mathematics takes us still further from what is human, into the region of absolute necessity, to which only the actual world, but every possible world, must conform. — Bertrand Russell · 1907James Baldwin4 quotes
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did. — James Baldwin · 1961Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models. — James Baldwin · 1960Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor. — James Baldwin · 1960You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive. — James Baldwin · 1963Oliver Wendell Holmes4 quotes
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past! — Oliver Wendell Holmes · 1858Man has his will,—but woman has her way! — Oliver Wendell Holmes · 1857There is no time like the old time, when you and I were young. — Oliver Wendell Holmes · 1865I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving. To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it,—but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor. — Oliver Wendell Holmes · 1858Susan Sontag4 quotes
Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals. — Susan Sontag · 1973Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism-victimless collecting, as it were... In a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments. — Susan Sontag · 1974What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a full human being and one's existence as a sexual being. — Susan Sontag · 1967Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? — Susan Sontag · 2001Dashiell Hammett3 quotes
The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter. — Dashiell Hammett · 1930He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works. — Dashiell Hammett · 1930That's the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling. — Dashiell Hammett · 1930E.B. White3 quotes
Commuter-one who spends his life
In riding to and from his wife;
A man who shaves and takes a train,
And then rides back to shave again. — E.B. White · 1982Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. — E.B. White · 1944Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth. — E.B. White · 1969E.M. Forster3 quotes
If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. — E.M. Forster · 1938It is not that the Englishman can't feel—it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks—his pipe might fall out if he did. — E.M. Forster · 1920Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three. — E.M. Forster · 1938Hannah Arendt3 quotes
It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil. — Hannah Arendt · 1963The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution. — Hannah Arendt · 1970The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade. — Hannah Arendt · 1970Joan Didion3 quotes
Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs. — Joan Didion · 1961To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home. — Joan Didion · 1961To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. — Joan Didion · 1961Norman Mailer3 quotes
Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists. — Norman Mailer · 1960The horror of the 20th Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation. — Norman Mailer · 1969There is probably no sensitive heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied at one time or another with his latent homosexuality. — Norman Mailer · 1955Toni Morrison3 quotes
It takes a village to raise a child. — Toni Morrison · 1984I don't wait to be struck by lightning and don't need certain slants of light in order to write. — Toni Morrison · 1981There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. — Toni Morrison · 2015Christopher North2 quotes
Laws were made to be broken. — Christopher North · 1830His Majesty's dominions, on which the sun never sets. — Christopher North · 1829Clement Greenberg2 quotes
All profoundly original art looks ugly at first. — Clement Greenberg · 1945Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations... Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. — Clement Greenberg · 1939Dorothy Parker2 quotes
Come on down to my apartment-I want to show you some remarkably fine etchings I just bought. — Dorothy Parker · 1931There's a helluva distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words. — Dorothy Parker · 1956F. Scott Fitzgerald2 quotes
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. — F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1936The victor belongs to the spoils. — F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1922G.K. Chesterton2 quotes
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere. — G.K. Chesterton · 1928They say travel broadens the mind; but you must have the mind. — G.K. Chesterton · 1921Gloria Steinem2 quotes
Now, we are becoming the men we wanted to marry. — Gloria Steinem · 1982Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke; that's their natural and first weapon. — Gloria Steinem · 1972John Steinbeck2 quotes
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen. — John Steinbeck · 1947A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator. — John Steinbeck · 1954John Updike2 quotes
Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the others players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he refused. Gods do not answer letters. — John Updike · 1960Some sense of religious mission is part of being American. — John Updike · 1996Joseph Beuys2 quotes
To be a teacher is my greatest work of art. — Joseph Beuys · 1969Even the act of peeling a potato can be a work of art if it is a conscious act. — Joseph Beuys · 1969Maya Angelou2 quotes
It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. — Maya Angelou · 2013I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, "You know, that's the truth. I wasn't there, and I wasn't a six-foot black girl, but that's the truth." — Maya Angelou · 2013Pablo Picasso2 quotes
Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. — Pablo Picasso · 1956The blue period was not a question of color. It was an inner necessity to paint like that. — Pablo Picasso · 1956Ray Bradbury2 quotes
I discovered me in the library. — Ray Bradbury · 2010There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. — Ray Bradbury · 2010