things that brilliant people have said

"Now once more the belt is tight and we summon the proper expression of horror as we look back at our wasted youth. Sometimes, though, there is a ghostly rumble among the drums, an asthmatic whisper in the trombones that swings me back into the early twenties when we drank wood alcohol and every day in every way grew better and better, and there was a first abortive shortening of the skirts, and girls all looked alike in sweater dresses, and people you didn't want to know said 'Yes, we have no bananas,' and it seemed only a question of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were - and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Although a man may lose a sense of his own importance when he is a mere unit among a busy throng, all utterly regardless of him, it by no means follows that he can dispossess himself, with equal facility, of a very strong sense of the importance and magnitude of his cares."

"When I speak of home, I speak of the place where -- in default of a better -- those I love are gathered together; and if that place were a gypsy's tent, or a barn, I should call it by the same good name notwithstanding."

"Love, however, is very materially assisted by a warm and active imagination: which has a long memory, and will thrive, for a considerable time, on very slight and sparing food."

"Mystery and disappointment are not absolutely indispensable to the growth of love, but they are, very often, its powerful auxiliaries."
Nicholas Nickleby Charles Dickens

"I am not young enough to know everything." Oscar Wilde

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
Lady Windermere's Fan Oscar Wilde

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."

"Oh, I don't think I would care to catch a sensible man. I shouldn't know what to talk to him about." The Importance of Being Earnest Oscar Wilde

"The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional." The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde