“Affectation of candour is common enough; one meets with it everywhere.”

“Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature;”

— William Shakespeare《Hamlet》

“The spirit that I have seen may be the devil, and the devil hath power t'assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps out of my weakness and my melancholy, as he is very potent with such spirits, abuses me to damn me.”

— William Shakespeare《Hamlet》

“Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.”

— Oscar Wilde《The Picture of Dorian Gray》

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”

— Oscar Wilde《The Picture of Dorian Gray》

“The position, as it would appear to a plain person of ordinary common sense, is that a woman who is legally married to one man and is living as the wife of another, is a married woman who is living with a man who is not her husband.”

— R. Austin Freeman《Helen Vardon's confession》

“The man with the book was not reading aloud, and no one spoke; all seemed to be waiting for something to occur; the dead man only was without expectation.”

— Ambrose Bierce《The Damned Thing》

“Call me Ishmael.”

— Herman Melville《Moby-Dick》

“The answer is, that we must do good to our seeming and real good friends, and evil to our seeming and real evil enemies--good to the good, evil to the evil.”

— Plato《The Republic of Plato》

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

— Charles Dickens《A Tale of Two Cities》

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald《The Great Gatsby》

“All right, then, I'll go to hell.”

— Mark Twain《Adventures of Huckleberry Finn》

“His was the faith which is clothed in wisdom; his the wisdom which is hallowed by faith.”

— Aaron Bernstein《Some Jewish Witnesses For Christ》