Wonderland

Oscar Wilde:

I. Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet, what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Words! Was there anything so real as words?

II. Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

III. The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.
The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a
new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of
autobiography.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are cor-
rupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things
are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only
Beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
The nineteenth-century dislike of Realism is the rage of
Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth-century dislike of Romanticism is the rage
of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.
The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of
the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect
use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove
anything. Even things that are true can be proved.
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in
an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express every-
thing.
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an
art.
Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is
the art of the musician. From the point of view of feel-
ing, the actor’s craft is the type.
All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the
work is new, complex, and vital.
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as
he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a
useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.

Other Quotes:

I. Fate abruptly brought together, and wedded with its resistless power, these two shattered lives, dissimilar in years, but similar in sorrow. The one, indeed, was the complement of the other. The instinct of Cosette sought for a father, as the instinct of Jean Valjean sought for a child. To meet, was to find another. In that mysterious moment, when their hands touched, they were welded together. When their two souls saw each other, they recognized that they were mutually needed, and they closely embraced. -Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

II. "If you live to be one hundred, I want to live to be one hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you." -Winnie-The-Pooh

III. We say we love flowers, yet we pluck them. We say we love trees, yet we cut them down. And people still wonder why some are afraid when told they are loved. -Anonymous

Let's throw some Dickinson in there:

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

Or rather, be passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.

We paused before house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

And some Poe while we're at it:

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow:
You are not wrong who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand--
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep--while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Yes, I think I've bombarded you enough for now. =P