No man is rich enough to buy back his past.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Only the shallow know themselves.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

I am not young enough to know everything.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

I think that God, in creating Man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

As long as war is regarded as wicked it will always have its fascinations. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

(from The Ballad of Reading Gaol) He did not wring his hands nor weep, Nor did he peek or pine, But he drank the air as though it held Some healthful anodyne; With open mouth he drank the sun As though it had been wine!

(from De Profundis) ... Nature, whose sweet rains fall on just and unjust alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undetected. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

I see when men love women they give but a little of their lives but women when they love give everything.

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

Who, being loved, is poor?

(as he sipped champagne on his deathbed) Alas, I am dying beyond my means.

I like the word 'indolence'. It makes my laziness seem classy.

Tennessee Williams

(from Camino Real) Caged birds accept each other but flight is what they long for.

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

Gary Wills

Only the winners decide what were war crimes.

Earl Wilson

If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments.

Robert Anton Wilson

Belief is the death of intelligence.

Only the madman is absolutely sure.

Tshunka Witko, Sioux (Crazy Horse)

One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk.

Virginia Woolf

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

William Wordsworth

The best portion of a good man's life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.

Frank Lloyd Wright

The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines.

Steven Wright

What's another word for Thesaurus?

I woke up this morning, and I realized that somebody had broken into my apartment, stolen all my things and replaced them with exact duplicates. I asked my roommate if he noticed anything, and he said, 'Who are you?'

A cop stopped me for speeding. He said, "Why were you going so fast?" I said, "See this thing my foot is on? It's called an accelerator. When you push down on it, it sends more gas to the engine. The whole car just takes right off. And see this thing? This steers it.

Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before.