"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened."
— Winston S. Churchill

"A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen."
— Winston S. Churchill

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing."
— Oscar Wilde

"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)

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
— Oscar Wilde

"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."
— Oscar Wilde

"Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays."
— Oscar Wilde

"One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards."
— Oscar Wilde

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything."
— Oscar Wilde

"A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."
— Oscar Wilde

"You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray and Three Stories)

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
— Mark Twain

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."
— Mark Twain

"Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."
— Mark Twain

"An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before."
— Mark Twain

"Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint."
— Mark Twain

"The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else."
— George Bernard Shaw

"All the women I know feel a little like outlaws."
— Marilyn French

"That's sheer luck too: luck of the draw of birth: century, continent, nation, section, sex, color, socioeconomic sector."
— Marilyn French (Our Father)

"I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites."
— Philip Pullman

"'That's the duty of the old,' said the Librarian, 'to be anxious on the behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.'
They sat for a while longer, and then parted, for it was late, and they were old and anxious."
— Philip Pullman (The Golden Compass)

"You are so young, Lyra, too young to understand this, but I shall tell you anyway and you'll understand it later: men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain. We bear their children, who are witches if they are female, human if not; and then in the blink of an eye they are gone, felled, slain, lost. Our sons, too. When a little boy is growing, he thinks he is immortal. His mother knows he isn't. Each time becomes more painful, until finally your heart is broken. Perhaps that is when Yambe-Akka comes for you. She is older than the tundra. Perhaps, for her, witches' lives are as brief as men's are to us."
— Philip Pullman (The Golden Compass)

"I don't know whether there's a God or not. Nobody does, no matter what they say. I think it's perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don't know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away. Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it's because he's ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they're responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I'd want nothing to do with them."
— Philip Pullman

"If a witch needs something, another witch will give it to her. If there is war to be fought, we don't consider cost one of the factors in deciding whether or not it is right to fight. Nor do we have any notion of honor. An insult to a bear is a deadly thing. To us...inconceivable. How could you insult a witch? What would it matter if you did?"
— Philip Pullman (The Golden Compass)

"What is worth having is worth working for."
— Philip Pullman

"Miss Barry was a kindred spirit after all," Anne confided to Marilla, "You wouldn't think so to look at her, but she is. . . Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It's splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world."
— L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables)

"Tomorrow is fresh, with no mistakes in it."
— L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables)

"Mrs. Cadbury: Tell me what you know about yourself.
Anne Shirley: Well, it really isn't worth telling, Mrs. Cadbury... but if you let me tell you what I IMAGINE about myself you'd find it a lot more interesting."
— L.M. Montgomery

"There's such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I'm such a troublesome person. If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn't be half so interesting."
— L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables)

"Well, it all comes to this; there's no use trying to live in other people's opinions. The only thing to do is to live in your own. After all, I believe in myself. I'm not so bad and silly as they think me, and I'm not consumptive, and I can write. Now that I've written it all out I feel differently about it. The only thing that still aggravates me is that Miss Potter pitied me -- pitied by a Potter!"
— L.M. Montgomery (Emily Climbs)

"You may tire of reality but you never tire of dreams."
— L.M. Montgomery (The Road to Yesterday)

"Why did dusk and fir-scent and the afterglow of autumnal sunsets make people say absurd things?"
— L.M. Montgomery (Emily's Quest)

"There might be some hours of loneliness. But there was something wonderful even in loneliness. At least you belonged to yourself when you were lonely."
— L.M. Montgomery (Mistress Pat)

"The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpended the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a fingerprint of a shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside. "
— Virginia Woolf

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

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
— George Bernard Shaw

"There is no love sincerer than the love of food."
— George Bernard Shaw (Man and Superman)

"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

"In heaven an angel is no one in particular."
— 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

"Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads."
— George Bernard Shaw

"When a stupid man does something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty."
— 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

"There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it."
— George Bernard Shaw

"When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuosly until death do them part"
— George Bernard Shaw

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