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

“There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.”

— Jane Austen《Pride and Prejudice》

“Call me Ishmael.”

— Herman Melville《Moby-Dick》

“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”

— William Shakespeare《Hamlet》

“And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody.”

— Jane Austen《Pride and Prejudice》

“This above all: to thine own self be true;”

— William Shakespeare《Hamlet》

“But nature itself, she thought, would be no better than a vast blank, if the mind of the observer did not supply it with an animating soul.”

— William Godwin《Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman》

“Your mother thought that as you and I, in a short time, have become, so to say, friends, and you have some confidence in me, I am in a position to give you good advice—and you would mind what I say.”

— Ivan Turgenev《The Torrents of Spring》

“I thought of Scudder, of the thousand friends I had lost, of the great seas of blood and the mountains of sorrow this man and his like had made for the world.”

— John Buchan《Mr. Standfast》

“I have thought since of the wonderful goodness of God to me in preserving me in the use of my reason and senses in that distressed time, that I did not use wicked and violent means to end my own miserable life.”

— Mary Rowlandson《Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson》

“As for yourself, death shall come to you from the sea, and your life shall ebb away very gently when you are full of years and peace of mind, and your people shall bless you.”

— Homer《Odyssey》

“But here was a man who had never done anything but good in his life, and was at the bar of justice charged with crime merely because some cold-blooded mercenaries thought he was interfering with their business!”

— Arthur Cheney Train《By Advice of Counsel》

“The living soul demands life, the soul won’t obey the rules of mechanics, the soul is an object of suspicion, the soul is retrograde!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky《Crime and Punishment》