“One cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.”

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming.”

— 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》

“Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief.”

— 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》

“Women can resist a man’s love, a man’s fame, a man’s personal appearance, and a man’s money, but they cannot resist a man’s tongue when he knows how to talk to them.”

— Wilkie Collins《The Woman in White》

“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》

“A woman with so passionate a nature as hers, married against her will to a man she could never love, and meeting once more the man whom she loved, the man who really loved her, must find such friendship a dangerous pitfall.”

— Grant Allen《Linnet》

“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》

“I know not, I know not where Danusia is but I challenged him, because, even if I were to lose my life, I prefer death to life without my love, without the one who is clearest to me in the whole world.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz《The Knights of the Cross, or, Krzyzacy: Historical Romance》

“And mind governs reason, and reason obeys mind; and mind is irremovable by fortune, cannot be taken away by informers, cannot be destroyed by disease, cannot have inroads made into it by old age.”

— Plutarch《Plutarch's Morals》

“No word for food or water or man--words for good food and bad food, or rain water and sea water, or strong man and weak man--but no names for general classes.”

— Stanley G. Weinbaum《A Martian Odyssey》

“To a woman indifferent to love, every man is the same, and all are men; but to her whose heart is truly susceptible of that refined passion, there is no other man in the world but her lover.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau《Eloisa: or, A series of original letters》