Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

1. Ah! Don't say that you agree with me. When People agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong.
2. Always forgive your enemies, nothing annoys them quite so much.
3. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
4. Art never expresses anything but itself.
5. Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
6. The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.
7. Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation.
8. A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. - from Lady Windermere's Fan
9. The difference between journalism and literature is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
10. Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
11. A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
12. Education is an admirable thing, but nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
13. Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.
14. Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
15. Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.
16. Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. - from Lady Windermere's Fan
17. The good end happily, the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.
18. History is merely gossip.
19. I can resist everything except temptation.
20. I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing.
21. If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.
22. I have nothing to declare but my genius.
23. Imagination is a quality given a man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.
24. I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
25. In this world there are only two tragedies: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
26. I see when men love women they give but a little of their lives but women when they love give everything.
27. It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done.
28. It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn't a dentist. It produced a false impression. - from The Importance of Being Earnest
29. Life is too important to be taken seriously.
30. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but molds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.
31. A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
32. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. - from The Picture of Dorian Gray
33. Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
34. Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.
35. Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.
36. Mrs. Otis had a magnificent constitution and a really wonderful amount of animal spirits. Indeed, in mnay respects she was quite English and was an excellent example of the fact that we have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, the language. (The Canterville Ghost, 1888)
37. None of us can stand other people who have the same faults as ourselves.
38. Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
39. The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything.
40. On an occaision of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure. - from The Importance of Being Earnest
41. One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
42. Put your talent into your work, but your genius into your life.
43. The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception a necessity.
44. The recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. The true perfection of man lies, not on what man has, but in what man is.
45. Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief.
46. Satire is always as sterile as it is shameful and is impotent as it is insolent.
47. There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope
48. There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all. - from The Picture of Dorian Gray
49. There is only one thing that is worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. - from The Picture of Dorian Gray
50. A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
51. To love one's self is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
52. Truth in matter of religion is simply the opinion that has survived.
53. The truth is rarely pure, and never simple. - from The Importance of Being Earnest
54. We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. - from Lady Windermere's Fan
55. When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.
56. Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.
57. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) --English author

1. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done;
   it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.
2. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way. - from A Tale of Two Cities
3. It was a turkey! He could never have stood upon his legs, that bird! He would have snapped 'em off short in a minute, like sticks of sealing wax. (A Christmas Carol [1843])
4. Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he's well dressed. There ain't much credit in that.

Elizabeth Gaskell

1. I'll not listen to reasonReason always means what someone else has to say.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

1. I am a part of all that I have seen.
2. Cleave never to the sunnier side of doubt.
3. I hold it true, whate'er befall;
   I feel it, when I sorrow most;
   'Tis better to have loved and lost
   Than never to have loved at all. - from In Memoriam
4. There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.

William Blake (1757-1827) --English poet, artist

1. I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's.
2. It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.
3. To see a world in a grain of sand
   And a heaven in a wild flower,
   Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
   And eternity in an hour. - from Auguries of Innocence
4. A Truth that's told with bad intent
   Beats all the Lies you can invent - from Auguries of Innocence
5. Mutual forgiveness of each vice.
   Such are the Gates of Paradise. - from The Gates of Paradise
6. I was angry with my friend
   I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
   I was angry with my foe:
   I told it not, my wrath did grow. - from A Poison Tree
7. He's a Blockhead who wants a proof of what he Can't Percieve
   And he's a Fool who tries to make such a Blockhead believe. - from Notebooks
8. A dog starv'd at the master's gate
   Predicts the ruin of the State.
   A horse misus'd upon the road
   Calls to heaven for human blood.
   Each outcry of the hunted hare
   A fibre from the brain does tear,
   A skylark wounded on the wing,
   A cherubim does cease to sing. - from Auguries of Innocence
9. When the doors of perception are cleansed, man will see things as they truly are, infinite.
10. He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) --English poet

1. Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.
2. Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
3. He saw a lawyer killing a viper
   On a dunghill hard, by his own stable
   And the devil smiled, for it put him in mind
   Of Cain and his brother, Abel.
4. The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions - the little, soon forgotten charities of a kiss or a smile, a kind look or heartfelt compliment.
5. Only the wise possess ideas; the greater part of mankind are possessed by them.
6. I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is prose; words in their best order;-poetry; the best words in the best order.