Source identified
“Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.”
Voice: Fictional character · Mary Crawford
The line is comic rather than literal advice, using exaggeration to expose how readily people excuse entrenched self-interest.
Source note: Mary Crawford makes the remark while discussing motives and conduct in company.
Source identified
“To define is to limit.”
Voice: Fictional character · Lord Henry Wotton
Definitions clarify ideas but can also narrow them, especially when a label is treated as the complete reality of a person or experience.
Source note: The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 edition, Chapter 17; Lord Henry answers the Duchess of Monmouth’s question “What are you?” with “To define is to limit.”
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“You and I are but sewing-machines.”
Voice: Dialogue speaker · Old Man
The comic comparison reduces human pride by placing ordinary people beside the much richer creative machinery Twain has just attributed to Shakespeare.
Source note: What Is Man?, Old Man speaking after comparing Shakespeare with a Gobelin loom; the machine metaphor is part of the essay’s comic-philosophical dialogue.
Source identified
“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
The joke exaggerates how difficult secrecy becomes once information is shared, making discretion the safest form of confidentiality.
Source note: Poor Richard’s Almanack; one of Franklin’s compact maxims about secrecy and human behavior.
Source identified
“He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals.”
The joke distinguishes healthy self-respect from vanity by showing how self-adoration can become a closed competition with everyone else.
Source note: Poor Richard’s Almanack.
Source identified
“Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.”
Wilde uses deliberate contradiction to suggest that solemnity is not the only way to take life seriously.
Source note: Lady Windermere’s Fan.