“Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.” — Baudelaire

“There is something essentially ridiculous about critics, anyway: what is good is good without our saying so, and beneath all our majesty we know this.” — Randall Jarrell

“My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me.” — Benjamin Disraeli

“Everybody is somebody’s bore.” — Edith Sitwell

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, each of us will have two ideas.” — George Bernard Shaw

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point.” — Thomas Jefferson

“Talent is luck, what’s important in life is courage.” — Woody Allen

“Art produces ugly things that frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things that always become ugly with time.” — Jean Cocteau

When Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, was stepping out of her carriage one day, an Irish dustman exclaimed, “Love and bless you, my lady, let me light my pipe in your eyes!”

Afterward, whenever others would praise her, she would reply, “After the dustman’s compliment, all others are insipid.”

“I am reminded of the professor who, in his declining hours, was asked by his devoted pupils for his final counsel. He replied, ‘Verify your quotations.'” — Winston Churchill