Friedrich > Friedrich's Quotes

“The past is always tense, the future perfect.”
― Zadie Smith

“Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

“Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else. ”
― Zadie Smith

“The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.”
― Zadie Smith

“Sometimes I wonder if people don't want freedom as much as they want meaning.”
― Zadie Smith, Swing Time

“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.”
― Umberto Eco

“You are who you are when nobody's watching.”
― Stephen Fry

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself and you will be happy.”
― Stephen Fry

“No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.”
― Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot

“Self-consciousness, that's what it is. Always my abiding vice. I keep seeing myself. Me watching myself watching others watch me. How do you lose that? What's the trick?”
― Stephen Fry, Making History

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Yes: I am a dreamer. For 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.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Critic As Artist: With Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Nothing and Discussing Everything

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“A good friend will always stab you in the front.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I am not young enough to know everything.”
― Oscar Wilde

“You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.”
― oscar wilde

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

“I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it....”
― George Bernard Shaw

“You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“After all, the wrong road always leads somewhere.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“We live in time - it holds us and molds us - but I never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending