Quotations

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."

— Oscar Wilde, Irish writer, born 1854

"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion."

— Oscar Wilde, Irish writer, born 1854

"The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose."

— Oscar Wilde, Irish writer, born 1854

"I feel very Jewish, and I feel very grateful to be Jewish. But I don't believe in God or anything to do with the Jewish religion."

— Gene Wilder, American actor, born 1933

"If my mother hadn't laughed at the funny things I did, I probably wouldn't be a comic actor. After she had her first heart attack, the doctor said, 'Try to make her laugh.' And that was the first time I tried to make anyone laugh."

— Gene Wilder, American actor, born 1933

"Sometimes life gives us lessons sent in ridiculous packaging."

— Dar Williams, American singer, born 1967

"Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you--gently, with love, and hand your life back to you, like something gold you let go of--and I can! I'm determined to do it--and nothing's more determined than a cat on a tin roof--is there?"

— Tennessee Williams, American playwright, born 1883

"First we have to see. Or first we have to be taught to see. We have to be taught to see here, because here is everywhere, related to everywhere else, and if we don't see, hear, taste, smell and feel in this place - not only will we never know anything but the world of sense will be by that much diminished everywhere."

— William Carlos Williams, American poet, born 1883

"It is difficult to get news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."

— William Carlos Williams, American poet, born 1883

"As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight."

— William Carlos Williams, American poet, born 1883

"The poem springs from the half spoken words of the patient. When asked, how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem, I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing."

— William Carlos Williams, American poet, born 1883

"What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise?"

— William Carlos Williams, American poet, born 1883

"Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we learned here."

— Marianne Williamson, American spiritual teacher, born 1952

"We are not held back by the love we didn't receive in the past, but by the love we're not extending in the present."

— Marianne Williamson, American spiritual teacher, born 1952