"These memories are the memorials and pledges of the vital hours of a lifetime. These hours of afflatus in the human spirit, the springs of art, are, in their mystery, akin to the epochs of history, when a race which for centuries has lived content, unknown, behind its own frontiers, digging, eating, sleeping, begetting, doing what was requisite for survival and nothing else, will, for a generation or two, stupefy the world; commit all manner of crimes, perhaps; follow the wildest chimeras, go down in the end in agony, but leave behind a record of new heights scaled and new rewards won for all mankind; the vision fades, the soul sickens, and the routine of survival starts again."
— Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
— Albert Einstein

"It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this."
— Bertrand Russell

"A wise girl kisses but doesn't love, listens but doesn't believe, and leaves before she is left."
— Marilyn Monroe

"Yes, death. Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace. You can help me. You can open for me the portals of death's house, for love is always with you, and love is stronger than death is."
— Oscar Wilde (The Canterville Ghost)

"To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity."
— Oscar Wilde

"America has never quite forgiven Europe for having been discovered somewhat earlier in history than itself."
— Oscar Wilde

"The heart was made to be broken."
— Oscar Wilde

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser men so full of doubts."
— Bertrand Russell

"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge."
— Bertrand Russell

"In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock."
— Graham Greene

"And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence"
— Bertrand Russell

"War does not determine who is right - only who is left."
— Bertrand Russell

"Sin is geographical."
— Bertrand Russell

"I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember."
— Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)

"Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us."
— Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)

"He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole."
— Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)

"No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to Hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretends it's God and hate that."
— Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder)

"Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.
"
— Evelyn Waugh

"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading."
— Logan Pearsall Smith

"Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it."
— P.J. O'Rourke

"A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity."
— Germaine Greer