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

"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage."
— Laozi

"I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death."
— Robert Fulghum (All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten)

"Don't worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you."
— Robert Fulghum

"Yelling at living things does tend to kill the spirit in them. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts..."
— Robert Fulghum

"When we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness - and call it love - true love."
— Robert Fulghum

"If you tell people you talk to God, they'll think you're religious, but if you say God talks to you, it's ten to one they'll think you're crazy."
— Robert Fulghum (Maybe, Maybe Not)

"The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer."
— Oscar Wilde

"Whenever people agree with me, I always think I must be wrong."
— Oscar Wilde

"The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions."
"I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"She is a peacock in everything but beauty!"
— Oscar Wilde

"Ah! The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women...merely adored."
— Oscar Wilde (An Ideal Husband)

"...the great events of the world take place in the brain..."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"One should always be a little improbable."
— Oscar Wilde

"Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone."
— Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays)

"For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time. That is not such a tragic thing as possibly it sounds to you. To those who are in prison tears are a part of every day's experience. A day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one's heart is hard, not a day on which one's heart is happy."
— Oscar Wilde (De Profundis and Other Writings)

"The tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self denial."
— Oscar Wilde

"The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"A method of procuring sensations? Do you think then, that a man who has once committed a murder could possibly do the same crime again? Don't tell me that." says Dorian.
"Oh! anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often," says Lord Henry"
— Oscar Wilde

"Cecily. This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade.
Gwendolen. [Satirically.] I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different."
— Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)

"Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"Listen up -- there's no war that will end all wars."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It's like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven't seen in a long time."
— Haruki Murakami

"But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives."
— Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)

"And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing."
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"She waited for the train to pass. Then she said, "I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while."
— Haruki Murakami (Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman)

"Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

An you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"It's hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart."
— Haruki Murakami

"The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.
...
[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"I do not want to know what you will hope for. I want to know what you will work for. I do not want your sympathy for the needs of humanity. I want your muscle. As the wagon driver said when they came to a long, hard hill: ‘Them that’s going on with us, get out and push. Them that ain’t, get out of the way’. "
— Robert Fulghum

"Peace is not something you wish for,  it is something you make, something you are, something you do,and something you give away. "
— Robert Fulghum

"One of the very few reasons I had any respect for my mother when I was thirteen was because she would reach into the sink with her bare hands - bare hands - and pick up that lethal gunk and drop it into the garbage. To top that, I saw her reach into the wet garbage bag and fish around in there looking for a lost teaspoon. Bare hands - a kind of mad courage."
— Robert Fulghum

"Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends."
— George Bernard Shaw

"Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself."
— George Bernard Shaw

"All great truths begin as blasphemies."
— George Bernard Shaw

"If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance."
— George Bernard Shaw

"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."
— George Bernard Shaw

"This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy."
— George Bernard Shaw

"The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity. "
— George Bernard Shaw

"Those who can not change their minds can not change anything."
— George Bernard Shaw

"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."
— George Bernard Shaw

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. "
— George Bernard Shaw

"You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?'"
— George Bernard Shaw

"You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul."
— George Bernard Shaw

"Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!"
— George Bernard Shaw

"People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them."
— George Bernard Shaw

"A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."
— George Bernard Shaw