Ithinkican2 Scott > Ithinkican2's Quotes

“If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.”
― Edith Wharton

“Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.”
― Edith Wharton

“My little dog—a heartbeat at my feet.”
― Edith Wharton

“His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled dreams of an inarticulate lifetime.”
― Edith Wharton

“The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosohpically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“No good deed goes unpunished.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do.”
― Oscar Wilde

“In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. (Mr. Dumby, Act III)”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Youth is wasted on the young.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“The world is a stage and the play is badly cast.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Consistency is the hallmark of the unimaginative.”
― Oscar Wilde

“With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde

“Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.”
― Oscar Wilde

“One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead.”
― Oscar Wilde

“We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.”
― Oscar Wilde

“A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– 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.
One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up