Surya > Surya's Quotes

“I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It's not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station….”
― William Faulkner

“You gave too much rein to your imagination. Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely.”
― Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles

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

“Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside she is covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary--and terrible elegant. ”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.”
― Oscar Wilde (attributed to)

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

“Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.”
― John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”
― Oscar Wilde

“... but as has been said, September read often, and liked it best when words did not pretend to be simple, but put on their full armor and rode out with colors flying.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

“I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“He felt that taking naps was much more beneficial than confronting catastrophes.”
― Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow

“Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.”
― Oscar Wilde

“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Life is too short to learn German”
― Oscar Wilde

“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Hear no evil, speak no evil, and you won't be invited to cocktail parties.”
― Oscar Wilde

“This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go.”
― 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

“Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart—hearts are made to be broken—but that it turns one’s heart to stone.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm.”
― Oscar Wilde

“If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless."

"Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them."

"I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest