“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.”

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

— Jane Austen《Pride and Prejudice》

“A person who can write a long letter with ease cannot write ill.”

— Jane Austen《Pride and Prejudice》

“I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.”

— 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》

“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》

“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》

“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》

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald《The Great Gatsby》

“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》

“All right, then, I'll go to hell.”

— Mark Twain《Adventures of Huckleberry Finn》