Emma > Emma's Quotes

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“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 tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost

“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”
― Oscar Wilde

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

“A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The basis of optimism is sheer terror.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“You must have a cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I don't like compliments, and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Illusion is the first of all pleasures”
― Voltaire

“To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“I analyzed you, though you did not adore me.”
― Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The secret to life is to enjoy the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”
― Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature

“I hate solitude, but I'm afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.”
― Iris Murdoch, Under the Net

“Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.”
― Iris Murdoch

“Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.”
― Iris Murdoch

“Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare's, the Cornish sea.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“youth is a marvelous garment”
― Iris Murdoch, The Bell

“Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.”
― Iris Murdoch

“The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.”
― Iris Murdoch

“What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?”
― Iris Murdoch, Nuns and Soldiers

“The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves. We are intermittent creatures, always falling to little ends and rising to new beginnings. Our soon-tired consciousness is meted out in chapters, and that the world will look quite different tomorrow is, both for our comfort and our discomfort, usually true. How marvelously too night matches sleep, sweet image of it, so nearly apportioned to our need. Angels must wonder at these beings who fall so regularly out of awareness into a fantasm-infested dark. How our frail identities survive these chasms no philosopher has ever been able to explain.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems