"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"What is the meaning of life?... a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark."
— Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse)

"I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being, just as you are--or, at all events, that I must try and become one."
— Henrik Johan Ibsen (The Doll's House: A Play)

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."
— Emily Dickinson

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry."
— Emily Dickinson

"Am I hideous, Jane?

Very, sir: you always were, you know.
"
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

"When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young."
— Maya Angelou

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
— Maya Angelou

"Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life."
— Kate Chopin (The Awakening, and Selected Stories)

"I love man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man."
— Mary Shelley (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman)

"...once I falsely hoped to meet the beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding."
— Mary Shelley (Frankenstein)

"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?"
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet."
— Emily Dickinson

"Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet: Between who?
Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord."
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool."
— William Shakespeare (As You Like It)

"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"Though this be madness, yet there is method in't."
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘nice doggie’ until you can find a rock."
— Will Rogers

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring barque,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved."
— William Shakespeare (Great Sonnets)

"People travel to wonder
at the height of the mountains,
at the huge waves of the seas,
at the long course of the rivers,
at the vast compass of the ocean,
at the circular motion of the stars,
and yet they pass by themselves
without wondering. "
— Augustine of Hippo

"Doubt is uncomfortable, certainty is ridiculous."
— Voltaire

"Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure."
— Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)

"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it."
— Mark Twain

"Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it."
— Mark Twain

"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."
— Mark Twain

"Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it."
— Mark Twain

"Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts or happenings. It consist mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever flowing through one's head."
— Mark Twain

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
— Mark Twain

"'You're only a rebel from the waist downwards,' he told her."
— George Orwell (1984)