Oscar Wilde once scolded his friend Lord Alfred Douglas for his sentimentality, writing that:
“A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. You think that one can have one's emotions for nothing. One cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for…As soon as you have to pay for an emotion you will know its quality, and be the better for such knowledge. And remember that the sentimentalist is always a cynic at heart. Indeed, sentimentality is merely the bank holiday of cynicism."
