Quotes by Oscar Wilde

Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more. 

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. 

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship. 

There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about. 

The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself. 

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. 

The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it… I can resist everything but temptation. 

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. 

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. 

Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about. 

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. 

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

To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect. 

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train. 

This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last. 

Who, being loved, is poor? 

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. 

Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them. 

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better. 

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. 

Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess. 

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. 

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike. 

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. 

Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you. 

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

Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed. 

You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit. 

Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not. 

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. 

Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement. 

In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever. 

Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities. 

Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to. 

It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But… it is better to be good than to be ugly. 

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. 

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry. 

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it. 

I can resist everything except temptation. 

The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable. 

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

Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects. 

The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation. 

Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow. 

Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are. 

If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized. 

The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. 

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. 

Work is the curse of the drinking classes. 

I am not young enough to know everything. 

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. 

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal. 

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. 

Nothing is so aggravating than calmness. 

Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance. 

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating. 

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul. 

One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation. 

The man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world. 

It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art. 

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up. 

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his. 

No man is rich enough to buy back his past. 

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating – people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing. 

When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her. 

Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both. 

One’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead. 

The basis of optimism is sheer terror. 

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything. 

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius. 

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

The salesman knows nothing of what he is selling save that he is charging a great deal too much for it. 

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life. 

Hatred is blind, as well as love. 

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world. 

I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself. 

Only the shallow know themselves. 

A poet can survive everything but a misprint. 

What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying. 

Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes. 

There is nothing so difficult to marry as a large nose. 

Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative. 

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

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. 

In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin. 

Everything popular is wrong. 

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

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk. 

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction. 

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

Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing. 

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason. 

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious. 

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure. 

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong. 

To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. 

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else. 

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray. 

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. 

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast. 

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives. 

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information. 

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up. 

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion. 

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her. 

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability. 

Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds. 

One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards. 

I have nothing to declare except my genuis. 

How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive. 

He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends. 

Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching. 

There is no sin except stupidity. 

In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience. 

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection. 

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love. 

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates. 

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be. 

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you. 

She is a peacock in everything but beauty. 

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all. 

An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him. 

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

Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the sexes. 

The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves. 

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us. 

There is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad. 

Alas, I am dying beyond my means. 

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable. 

There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies. 

I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect. 

I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly. 

As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied. 

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic. 

Woman begins by resisting a man’s advances and ends by blocking his retreat. 

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works. 

Illusion is the first of all pleasures. 

When good Americans die they go to Paris. 

There’s nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It’s a thing no married man knows anything about. 

Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing. 

No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating. 

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

The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happily married life. 

It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned. 

While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance. 

One’s past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged. 

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. 

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected. 

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away. 

Now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm. 

Charity creates a multitude of sins. 

Biography lends to death a new terror. 

It is always the unreadable that occurs. 

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all. 

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

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. 

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly. 

I want my food dead. Not sick, not dying, dead. 

Why was I born with such contemporaries? 

If there was less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world. 

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

All art is quite useless. 

Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life. 

Those whom the gods love grow young. 

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means. 

I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy. 

It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes. 

In married life three is company and two none. 

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty. 

Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. 

Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood. 

Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob. 

Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him. 

Ah! somehow life is bigger after all Than any painted angel could we see The God that is within us! 

To be in love is to surpass one’s self. 

Be happy, be happy; you shall have your red rose. I will build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with my own heart’s-blood. All that I ask of you in return is that you will be a true lover, for Love is wiser than Philosophy, though she is wise, and mightier than Power, though he is mighty. 

Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible. 

The man who says his wife can’t take a joke, forgets that she took him. 

Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief. 

When one has never heard a man’s name in the course of one’s life, it speaks volumes for him; he must be quite respectable. 

By persistently remaining single a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation. 

I think it’s very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone and not be defined by another person. 

I was disappointed in Niagara – most people must be disappointed in Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life. 

No man should have a secret from his wife. She invariably finds it out. 

The best way to enjoy your job is to imagine yourself without one. 

One must have some sort of occupation nowadays. If I hadn’t my debts I shouldn’t have anything to think about. 

Then there was a man who said, ‘I never knew what real happiness was until I got married; by then it was too late’ 

Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. 

It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone. 

Sometimes it takes courage to give into temptation. 

I love acting. It is so much more real than life. 

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being. 

The Americans are certainly hero-worshipers, and always take their heroes from the criminal classes. 

Too much work, and no vacation, Deserves at least a small libation. So hail! my friends, and raise your glasses, Work’s the curse of the drinking classes. 

Art never expresses anything but itself. 

There can be nothing more frequent than an occasional drink. 

To have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered. 

If you meet at dinner a man who has spent his life in educating himself – a rare type in our time … you rise from table richer, and conscious that a high ideal has for a moment touched and sanctified your days. But Oh! my dear Ernest, to sit next to a man who has spent his life in trying to educate others! What a dreadful experience that is! 

Youth! There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life’s lumber 

Books are never finished, They are merely abandoned. 

We are never more true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent. 

Ones real life is often the life that one does not lead. 

He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigraph on his tombstone. 

Personally, I have a great admiration for stupidity. 

It is a pity to make a mystery out of what should most easily be understood. There is nothing occult about the thought that all things maybe made well or made ill. A work of art is a well-made thing – that is all. It may be a well-made statue of a well-made chair or a well-made book. Art is not a special sauce applied to ordinary cooking; it is the cooking itself that is good. Most simply and generally, Art may be thought of as “The Well Doing of What Needs Doing.” 

I would not a bit mind sleeping in the cool grass in summer, and when winter came on sheltering myself by the warm close-thatched rick, or under the penthouse of a great barn, provided I had love in my heart. 

By doing just a little every day, I can gradually let the task completely overwhelm me. 

Without order nothing can exist-without chaos nothing can evolve. Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. 

Progress in thought is the assertion of individualism against authority. 

The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. … One might point out how the Renaissance was great, because it sought to solve no social problem, and busied itself not about such things, but suffered the individual to develop freely, beautifully, and naturally, and so had great and individual artists, and great, individual men. One might point out how Louis XIV, by creating the modern state, destroyed the individualism of the artist … 

I don’t at all like knowing what people say of me behind my back. It makes me far too conceited. 

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true. 

Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature. 

Like dear St. Francis of Assisi I am wedded to Poverty: but in my case the marriage is not a success. 

Pleasure without Champagne is purely artificial. 

The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all. 

Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out. 

I never forget a face, but in your case I’ll make an exception. 

Rugby is a game for barbarians played by gentlemen. Football is a game for gentlemen played by barbarians. 

There is no feeling more comforting and consoling than knowing you are right next to the one you love. 

There is something very morbid about modern sympathy with pain. 

It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. 

He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing. 

I can sympathize with everything, except suffering. 

What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colorless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism it saves us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with the higher ethics. 

The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. 

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. 

The value of an idea has nothing whatever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. 

Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account. 

Through our sunless lanes creeps Poverty with her hungry eyes, and Sin with his sodden face follows close behind her. Misery wakes us in the morning and Shame sits with us at night. 

A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on. 

To give and not expect return, that is what lies at the heart of love. 

Flowers are as common in the country as people are in London. 

History is merely gossip 

A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. 

Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment. 

No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists. 

Absolute catholicity of taste is not without its dangers. It is only an auctioneer who should admire all schools of art. 

Cultivated leisure is the aim of man. 

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result. 

As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid. 

In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilization. 

As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg 

As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. 

The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. 

It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings. 

In art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them. 

He was a hero to his valet, who bullied him, and a terror to most of his relations, whom he bullied in turn. Only England could have produced him, and he always said that the country was going to the dogs. His principles were out of date, but there was a good deal to be said for his prejudices. 

I don’t mind plain women being puritans. It is the only excuse they have for being plain. 

Let me be dressed as I will, yet flies worms and flowers exceed me still. 

The only proper intoxication is conversation. 

Individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one’s age. 

I don’t like principles. I prefer prejudices. 

Intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in morals mean absolutely nothing. 

Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sensual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change. 

We women adore failures. They lean on us. 

The worst vice of the fanatic is his sincerity. 

The only thing that ever consoles man for the stupid things he does is the praise he always gives himself for doing them. 

The sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful. 

Married men are horribly tedious when they are good husbands, and abominably conceited when they are not. 

Tell the cook of this restaurant with my compliments that these are the very worst sandwiches in the whole world, and that, when I ask for a watercress sandwich, I do not mean a loaf with a field in the middle of it. 

The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years. 

Whenever cannibals are on the brink of starvation, Heaven, in its infinite mercy, sends them a fat missionary. 

Really, if the lower orders don’t set a good example, what on earth is the use of them? 

Musical people always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be perfectly deaf. 

However, it is always nice to be expected, and not to arrive. 

I never play cricket. It requires one to assume such indecent postures. 

I don’t recognize you – I’ve changed a lot. 

The English have a miraculous power of turning wine into water. 

Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals. 

America is one long expectoration. 

Nowadays, all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men. 

The man with a clear conscience probably has a poor memory. 

It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiased opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always absolutely valueless. 

Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage makes her something like a public building. 

He must have a truly romantic nature, for he weeps when there is nothing at all to weep about. 

The evolution of man is slow. The injustice of men is great. 

Self-denial is simply a method by which arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage. 

Each little thing that we do passes into the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new civilization, more marvelous and more splendid than any that has gone before. 

The Roman Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone – for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do. 

Philosophy teaches us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of others. 

Learned conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally unemployed. 

When people talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about themselves they are nearly always interesting. 

The one advantage of playing with fire…is that no one ever gets singed. It is the people who don’t know how to play with it who get burned up. 

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live; it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognizes infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it. 

The General was essentially a man of peace, except in his domestic life. 

Conversation should touch everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing. 

Everyone is born a king, and most people die in exile. 

And let me touch those curving claws of yellow ivory; and grasp the tail that like a monstrous asp coils round your heavy velvet paws. 

The best revenge is to live well. 

In the old times men carried out their rights for themselves as they lived, but nowadays every baby seems born with a social manifesto in its mouth much bigger than itself. 

Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune. 

Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old fashioned quite suddenly. 

The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life. 

Public Opinion… an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force. 

Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. 

To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders…It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. 

It is he who has broken the bond of marriage – not I. I only break its bondage. 

You know what a woman’s curiosity is. 

I don’t like Switzerland; it has produced nothing but theologians and waiters. 

As a wicked man I am a complete failure. Why, there are lots of people who say I have never really done anything wrong in the whole course of my life. Of course they only say it behind my back. 

In love, it is better to know and be disappointed, than to not know and always wonder. 

Friendship never forgets. That is the wonderful thing about it. 

Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence. 

When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her. 

A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses. 

I write because it gives me the greatest possible artistic pleasure to write. If my work pleases the few I am gratified. As for the mob, I have no desire to be a popular novelist. It is far too easy. 

The modern sympathy with invalids is morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. 

The secret of life is in art. 

To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled – because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance. 

Self-denial is the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity. 

The British cook, for her iniquities, is a foolish woman who should be turned into a pillar of salt which she never knows how to use. 

Work is the curse of the drinking class. I can resist everything except temptation. Moderation is a fatal thing – nothing succeeds like excess. We are all of us in the gutter. But some of us are looking at the stars. 

So lets knock a couple back and make some noise 

We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell. 

Fashion: by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment the universal. 

Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear. 

Looking good and dressing well is a necessity. Having a purpose in life is not. 

To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life. 

It is art, and art only, that reveals us to ourselves. 

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. 

The only thing worse than being misquoted is being sentenced to two years’ hard labour for buggery 

The only thing in the world worse than being Oscar Wilde is not being Oscar Wilde. 

Check out my website. I get paid per view. 

And all the woods are alive with the murmur and sound of Spring, And the rose-bud breaks into pink on the climbing briar, And the crocus-bed is a quivering moon of fire Girdled round with the belt of an amethyst ring. 

Do not be afraid of the past. If people tell you that it is irrevocable, do not believe them. 

Nothing worth knowing can be taught. 

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. 

The gods bestowed on Max [Beerbohm] the gift of perpetual old age. 

M. Zola is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull. 

As for borrowing Mr. Whistler’s ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have heard him express have had reference to his own superiority as a painter over painters greater than himself. 

Each of us has heaven and hell in him… 

Credit is a young man’s capital. 

All bad art is the result of good intentions. 

And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life. 

You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages. 

Tea is the only simple pleasure left to us. 

I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate. 

Art is rarely intelligible to the criminal classes. 

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness. 

It is a vulgar error to suppose that America was ever discovered. It was merely detected. 

As I lounged in the Park, or strolled down Piccadilly, I used to look at everyone who passed me, and wonder, with mad curiosity, what sort of lives they led. some of them fascinated me. Others filled me with terror. 

As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others. Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. 

There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for a long time; the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer. 

The trouble with women is, that when they grow up, they turn into their mothers. The trouble with men is, that they don’t. 

My Salome is a mystic the sister of Salammbo a Saint Therese who worships the moon. 

Ah! happy day they whose hearts can break And peace of pardon win! How else may man make straight his plan And cleanse his soul from Sin? How else but through a broken heart May Lord Christ enter in? 

To be good is to be in harmony with one’s self. 

Look at the moon. How strange the moon seems! She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for dead things. 

Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics! 

Let me be surrounded by luxury, I can do without the necessities! 

And once, or twice, to throw the dice is a gentlemanly game, But he does not win who plays with Sin in the secret house of shame 

Where your life leads you, you must go 

People are either charming or tedious. 

I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb. 

It is not good for one’s morals to see bad acting 

Ah, on what little things does happiness depend. 

All art is immortal. For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life. 

Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak…. They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account. 

Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure. 

Good intentions have been the ruin of the world. The only people who have achieved anything have been those who have had no intentions at all. 

He who stands most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best. 

It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone and can be made as offensive as a brickbat. 

Man is a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex, multiform creature that bears within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh is tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead. 

Men are such cowards. They outrage every law in the world and are afraid of the world’s tongue. 

People seldom tell the truths that are worth telling. We ought to choose our truths as carefully as we choose our lies and to select our virtues with as much thought as we bestow upon the selection of our enemies. 

The world has been made by fools that wise men may live in it. 

Well, one must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusement in life. 

Disobedience is man’s original virtue. 

Niagara Falls is simply a vast unnecessary amount of water going over the wrong way and then falling over unnecessary cliffs…The wonder would be if the water did not fall. 

Cats are put on earth to remind us that not everything has a purpose. 

The answers are all out there, we just need to ask the right questions. 

It is curious how vanity helps the successful man and wrecks the failure. 

Philanthropy [has become] simply the refuge of people who wish to annoy their fellow creatures. 

More women grow old nowadays through the faithfulness of their admirers than through anything else. 

The poet is the supreme artist, for he is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and is lord over all life and all arts. 

Personality must be accepted for what it is. You mustn’t mind that a poet is a drunk, rather that drunks are not always poets. 

Wordsworth went to the Lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there. 

An entirely new factor has appeared in the social development of the country, and this factor is the Irish-American, and his influence. To mature its powers, to concentrate its action, to learn the secret of its own strength and of England’s weakness, the Celtic intellect has had to cross the Atlantic. At home it had but learned the pathetic weakness of nationality; in a strange land it realised what indomitable forces nationality possesses. What captivity was to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish: America and American influence have educated them. 

Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand, For I am drowning in a stormier sea Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee 

one pale woman all alone, The daylight kissing her wan hair, Loitered beneath the gas lamps’ flare, With lips of flame and heart of stone. 

St. Paul’s Loomed like a bubble o’er the town. 

The real weakness of England lies, not in incomplete armaments or unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that creeps through sunless lanes, or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome courts, but simply in the fact that her ideals are emotional and not intellectual. 

We become lovers when we see Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet makes us students. The blood of Duncan is upon our hands, with Timon werage against the world, and when Lear wanders out upon the heath the terror of madness touches us. Ours is the white sinlessness of Desdemona, and ours, also, the sin of Iago. 

In his very rejection of art Walt Whitman is an artist. He tried to produce a certain effect by certain means and he succeeded….He stands apart, and the chief value of his work is in its prophecy, not in its performance. He has begun a prelude to larger themes. He is the herald to a new era. As a man he is the precursor of a fresh type. He is a factor in the heroic and spiritual evolution of the human being. If Poetry has passed him by, Philosophy will take note of him. 

There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate-not to the artist but to the public…. Without them we would judge a man simply by his work; but at present the newspapers are trying hard to induce the public to judge a sculptor, for instance, never by his statues but by the way he treats his wife; a painter by the amount of his income and a poet by the colour of his necktie. 

Like strange mechanical grotesques, Making fantastic arabesques, The shadows raced across the blind. 

Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism. 

Though one can dine in New York, one could not dwell there. 

And thus we rust Life’s iron chain Degraded and alone: And some men curse, and some men weep, And some men make no moan: But God’s eternal Laws are kind And break the heart of stone 

Alas! it is a fearful thing To feel another’s guilt! 

In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people…. The Japanese people are … simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art. 

All modes of government are failures. Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things. Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and ochlocracies are unjust to the few. High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out. I must say that it was high time, for all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. 

The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all. 

Far away beyond the pine-woods,’ he answered, in a low dreamy voice, ‘there is a little garden. There the grass grows long and deep, there are the great white stars of the hemlock flower, there the nightingale sings all night long. All night long he sings, and the cold, crystal moon looks down, and the yew-tree spreads out its giant arms over the sleepers. 

How sad it is!” murmured Dorian Gray with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. “How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June… . If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that-for that-I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that! 

I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day-mock me horribly! 

the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life. 

What a fuss people make about fidelity!” exclaimed Lord Henry. “Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say. 

When a golden girl can win Prayer from out the lips of sin, When the barren almond bears, And a little child gives away its tears, Then shall all the house be still And peace come to Canterville. 

And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite. 

Anybody can have common sense, provided that they have no imagination. 

The gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats. Every month as it wanes bring you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. 

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. 

The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake. 

I quite agree with Dr. Nordau’s assertion that all men of genius are insane, but Dr. Nordau forgets that all sane people are idiots. 

You can’t possibly ask me to go without having some dinner. It’s absurd. I never go without my dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that. 

We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality. 

The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid 

I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours. 

Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast. 

What a silly thing love is!’ said the student as he walked away. ‘It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. In fact, it is quite unpractical, and, as in this age to be practical is everything, I shall go back to philosophy and study metaphysics.’ So he returned to his room and pulled out a great dusty book, and began to read. 

An egg is always an adventure; the next one may be different. 

You have always told me it was Ernest. I have introduced you to every one as Ernest. You answer to the name of Ernest. You look as if your name was Ernest. You are the most earnest-looking person I ever saw in my life. It is perfectly absurd your saying that your name isn’t Ernest. 

You have never been poor, and never known what ambition is. 

ever since I met you I have admired you more than any girl…I have ever met since…I met you. 

Hesitation of any kind is a sign of mental decay in the young, of physical weakness in the old. 

Thinking is wonderful, but the experience is even more wonderful. 

I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can’t go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left. ALGERNON: We have. JACK: I should extremely like to meet them. What do they talk about? ALGERNON: The fools? Oh! about the clever people of course. JACK: What fools. 

I have never admitted that I am more than twenty-nine, or thirty at the most. Twenty-nine when there are pink shades, thirty when there are not. 

The birds that were singing in the dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her. 

I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself. Sometimes I am so clever I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying. 

Unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow. Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed. The poor should be practical and prosaic. It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating. 

Sometimes, the unnecessary is necessary. 

I have a simple taste, only the best. 

It is better to repent a sin than regret the loss of a pleasure. 

Psycholog-y is in its infancy, as a science. I hope in the interests of Art, it will always remain so. 

The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there. 

I can resist anything but the temptation to make a clever witticism. 

The world is made by the singer for the dreamer. 

What consoles one nowadays is not repentance but pleasure. Repentance is quite out of date. 

There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new. 

Behind Joy and Laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind Sorrow there is always Sorrow. Pain, unlike Pleasure, wears no mask. 

If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward. 

Surely Love is a wonderful thing. It is more precious than emeralds, and dearer than fine opals. Pearls and pomegranates cannot buy it, nor is it set forth in the marketplace. It may not be purchased of the merchants, for can it be weighed out in the balance for gold. 

She has form,” he said to himself, as he walked away through the grove – “that cannot be denied to her; but has she got feeling? I am afraid not. In fact, she is like most artists; she is all style, without any sincerity. She would not sacrifice herself for others. She thinks merely of music, and everybody knows that arts are selfish. Still, it must be admitted that she has some beautiful notes in her voice. What a pity it is that they do not mean anything, or do any practical good. 

Any place you love is the world to you. 

There is no good talking to him,” said a Dragon-fly, who was sitting on the top of a large brown bulrush; “no good at all, for he has gone away.” “Well, that is his loss, not mine,” answered the Rocket. “I am not going to stop talking to him merely because he pays no attention. I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself, and I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.” “Then you should definitely lecture on Philosophy,” said the Dragon-fly. 

Every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character. 

Beauty is a form of genius – is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. 

Finding the meaning of life is easy. Simply get a dictionary, go to the ‘L’ section, and find the word ‘life.’ 

Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life. 

Great passions are for the great of soul, and great events can be seen only by those who are on a level with them 

A glass of absinthe is as poetical as anything in the world. What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset? 

More than half of modern culture depends upon what one shouldn’t read. 

I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out. 

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy. 

There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses. 

One’s days were too brief to take the burden of another’s errors on one’s shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it. 

Why is it that at a bachelor’s establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne? I ask merely for information. I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand. Good Heavens! Is marriage so demoralizing as that? I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person. 

Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don’t think it right. 

Nothing annoys people so much as not receiving invitations. 

To begin with, I dined there on Monday, and once a week is quite enough to dine with one’s own relations. 

JACK That is nonsense. If I marry a charming girl like Gwendolen, and she is the only girl I ever saw in my life that I would marry, I certainly won’t want to know Bunbury. ALGERNON Then your wife will. You don’t seem to realize, that in married life three is company and two is none. JACK That, my dear young friend, is the theory that the corrupt French Drama has been propounding for the last fifty years. ALGERNON Yes; and that the happy English home has proved in half the time. 

Yes; poor Bunbury is a dreadful invalid. Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shillyshallying with the question is absurd. 

Algy, you always adopt a strictly immoral attitude towards life. You are not quite old enough to do that. 

I hope to-morrow will be a fine day, Lane. It never is, sir. Lane, you’re a perfect pessimist. I do my best to give satisfaction, sir. 

In fact, now you mention the subject, I have been very bad in my own small way. I don’t think you should be so proud of that, though I am sure it must have been very pleasant. 

I have a business appointment that I am anxious… to miss. 

And now, dear Mr. Worthing, I will not intrude any longer into a house of sorrow. I would merely beg you not to be too much bowed down by grief. What seem to us bitter trials are often blessings in disguise. This seems to me a blessing of an extremely obvious kind. 

JACK Your duty as a gentleman calls you back. ALGERNON My duty as a gentleman has never interfered with my pleasures in the smallest degree. 

I never saw anybody take so long to dress, and with such little result. 

Even men of the noblest possible moral character are extremely susceptible to the influence of the physical charms of others. Modern, no less then Ancient History, supplies us with many most painful examples of what I refer to. If it were not so, indeed, History would be quite unreadable. 

LADY BRACKNELL Algernon is an extremely, I may almost say an ostentatiously, eligible young man. He has nothing, but he looks everything. What more can one desire? 

I find I have, and a heart doesn’t suit me, Windermere. Somehow it doesn’t go with modern dress. It makes one look old. 

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. 

When asked what he thought of sports, Oscar Wilde replied, “I approve of any activity that requires the wearing of special clothing. 

Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault. One had to pay over and over again, indeed. In her dealings with man, Destiny never closed her accounts. 

You told me you had destroyed it.” “I was wrong. It has destroyed me. 

To be popular one must be a mediocrity.” “Not with Women,” said the duchess, shaking her head; “and women rule the world. I assure you we can’t bear mediocrities. We women, as someone says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.” “It seems to me that we never do anything else,” murmered Dorian. 

I don’t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much 

Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience. 

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. 

I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am so afraid he will look just like every one else. 

No theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself 

I worshipped you too much. I am punished for it. You worshipped yourself too much. We are both punished. 

Every one of course represents the spirit of his age, but there is an eternal aspect of the Spirit of every age which may be caught. To recreate the past from the mutilated fragments of the present is the task of the Historian. 

Sins of the flesh are nothing. They are maladies for physicians to cure, if they should be cured. Sins of the soul alone are shameful. 

Music is the perfect type of art. 

Behind the perfection of a man’s style, must lie the passion of a man’s soul. 

You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher life, you know nothing. 

If a woman wants to hold a man she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him. 

The only one you need in your life is that person who shows you he needs you in his. 

To be good is to be in harmony with oneself. Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others. 

The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not its growth and development. 

LORD ILLINGWORTH: The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. MRS ALLONBY: And the body is born young and grows old. That is life’s tragedy. 

I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don’t interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty. 

It is Nature who makes our artists for us, though it may be Art who taught them their right mode of expression. 

Just be your self. Everybody else is already taken. 

Art, like Nature, has her monsters 

Nature, which makes nothing durable, always repeats itself so that nothing which it makes may be lost. 

The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence. 

The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace. 

The burden of this world is too great for one man to bear, and the world’s sorrow too heavy for one heart to suffer. 

What men call the shadow of the body is not the shadow of the body, but is the body of the soul. 

The ugly can be beautiful. The pretty, never. 

Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of London, or seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each other in the open square; but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion. 

She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes. That is always a sign of despair in a woman. 

Most people are boring and stupid. 

Many of the great achievements of the world were accomplished by tired and discouraged men who kept on working. 

Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them. 

Life is too short to be taken seriously. 

It was only in the theatre that I lived 

A gentleman never offends unintentionally 

Don’t tell me that you have exhausted Life. When a man says that, one knows that life has exhausted him. 

Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. 

The Bostonians take their learning too sadly: culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their “Hub,” as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. 

The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature. 

I find that forgiving one’s enemies is a most curious morbid pleasure; perhaps I should check it. 

Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best. 

She said that she would dance with me if I brought her red roses but in all my garden there is no red rose. 

We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbor with those virtues that are likely to benefit ourselves. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets. 

There is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty. 

In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. 

I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. 

Live the wonderful life that is in you. 

Divorces are made in heaven. 

The only possible form of exercise is to talk, not to walk. 

The problem with the common person is that he is so unbearably common! 

A man who marries his mistress leaves a vacancy in that position. 

One should never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference to one’s hearers. 

Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place. 

Placerea este testul naturii, semnul ei aprobator 

If a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. but if a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me, I would move back again and again and beg to be admitted so that I might share in what I was entitled to share. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation. 

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one center of pain. 

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. 

There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. 

I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art. 

There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. 

Don’t use big words. They mean so little. 

Life would be dull without them. 

Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, and creeds follow one another like the withered leaves of Autumn; but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons and a possession for all eternity. 

One’s only real life is the life one never leads. 

It’s beauty that captures your attention. personality which captures your heart. 

Put your talent into your work, but your genius into your life. 

One can live for years sometimes without living at all, and then all life comes crowding into one single hour. 

Lord Darlington (LD): I think life too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and fast rules. Lady Windemere (LW): If we had ‘hard-and-fast rules’ we would find life much simpler. LD: You allow of no exceptions? LW: None! LD: Ah, what a fascinating Puritan you are, LW. LW: The adjective was unnecessary, LD. 

I have never learned anything except from people younger than myself. 

To make a good salad is to be a brilliant diplomatist – the problem is entirely the same in both cases. To know exactly how much oil one must put with one’s vinegar. 

The curves of your lips rewrite history. 

There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession. 

When both a speaker and an audience are confused, the speech is profound. 

To toil for a hard master is bitter, but to have no master to toil for is more bitter still. 

Who am I to tamper with a masterpiece? 

Life! Life! Don’t let us go to life for our fulfillment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic 

Life, Lady Stutfield, is simply a mauvais quart d’heure made up of exquisite moments. 

Love will fly if held too lightly Love will die if held too tightly . . . 

Oh, he occasionally takes an alcoholiday. 

I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse. 

It is only the sacred things that are worth touching 

I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. 

Always borrow money from a pessimist. He won’t expect it back. 

because to influence a person is to give one’s own soul. 

The best way to make children good is to make them happy. 

You have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don’t even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid 

The proper basis for marriage is mutual misunderstanding. The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married. One should always be in love – that’s the reason one should never marry. 

Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying. 

If people are dishonest once, they will be dishonest a second time. And honest people should keep away from them. (Lady Chiltern) 

A man’s life is of more value than a woman’s. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. Our lives revolve in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man’s life progresses. I have just learnt this, and much else with it, from Lord Goring. And I will not spoil your life for you, nor see you spoil it as a sacrifice to me, a useless sacrifice. 

Lord AUGUSTUS:(looking around) Time to educate yourself, I suppose. DUMBY: No, time to forget all I have learned. That is much more important. 

It is only fair to state, with regard to modern journalists, that they always apologize to one in private for what they have written against one in public. 

What is said of man is nothing; the point is, who says it. 

Nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion. 

Early in life she had discovered the important truth that nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion; and by a series of reckless escapades, half of them quite harmless, she had acquired all the privileges of a personality. 

Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal. 

I will not bare my soul to their shallow prying eyes. My heart shall never be put under their microscope. 

American girls are as clever at concealing their parents as English women are at concealing their past. 

It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes. 

The mere mechanical technique of acting can be taught, but the spirit that is to give life to lifeless forms must be born in a man. No dramatic college can teach its pupils to think or to feel. It is Nature who makes our artists for us, though it may be Art who taught them their right mode of expression. 

The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful. 

In spite of the roaring of the young lions at the Union, and the screaming of the rabbits in the home of the vivisect, in spite of Keble College, and the tramways, and the sporting prints, Oxford still remains the most beautiful thing in England, and nowhere else are life and art so exquisitely blended, so perfectly made one. 

The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach. 

I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. 

The fatal errors of life are not due to man’s being unreasonable: an unreasonable moment may be one’s finest moment. They are due to man’s being logical. 

Every woman becomes their mother. That’s their tragedy. And no man becomes his. That’s his tragedy. 

Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul. 

The liar at any rate recognizes that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilized being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company. 

Dear little Swallow,’ said the Prince, ‘you tell me of marvelous things, but more marvelous than anything is the suffering of men and of women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery. 

They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance 

The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died. 

Nothing spoils romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman 

Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they’re better. 

Love! What is love? It’s nothing. It’s just a word. It doesn’t exist. Only pleasure is important. 

Society, civilized society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef. 

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don’t think. 

The longer I live, Dorian, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. In art, as in politics, les grand-peres ont toujours tort. 

The final mystery is oneself. 

The optimist sees the donut, the pessimist sees the hole. 

When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. 

I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. 

Give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth. 

Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn’t so, life wouldn’t be worth living. 

A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. 

We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful. 

I want to be good. I can’t bear the idea of my soul being hideous. 

Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. 

The ugly and stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live- undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They never bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Henry; my brains, such as they are- my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray’s good looks- we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly. 

He is fairer than the morning star, and whiter than the moon. For his body I would give my soul, and for his love I would surrender heaven. 

There is a fatality about good resolutions – that they are always made too late 

If we’re always guided by other people’s thoughts, what’s the point in having our own? 

Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. 

Poor? What does that matter? When poverty creeps in at the door, love flies in through the window. 

The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is. 

Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself. 

Ah, on what little things does happiness depend! I have read all that the wise men have written, and all the secrets of philosophy are mine, yet for want of a red rose is my life made wretched. 

My dear Arthur, I never talk scandal. I only talk gossip. What is the difference between scandal and gossip? Oh! Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. 

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn’t know the market place of any single thing. 

The truth about the life of a man is not what he does, but the legend which he creates around himself. 

every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. 

Oh, don’t cough, Ernest. When one is dictating one should speak fluently and not cough. Besides, I don’t know how to spell a cough. 

Because sometimes you have to do something bad to do something good. 

Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it. 

Most people are other people. 

Every impulse we strangle will only poison us. 

I have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and things. The Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature this is what I am looking for. It is absolutely necessary for me to find it somewhere. 

Always keep love in your heart. 

The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society. 

There are few things easier than to live badly and die well. 

If I hadn’t believed it, then I wouldn’t have seen it 

The people who have adored me- there have not been very many, but there have been some- have always insisted on living on, long after I had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me. 

Wisdom is to have dreams big enough not to lose sight when we pursue them. 

God and other artists are always a little obscure….. 

Make some sacrifice for your art and you will be repaid, but ask of art to sacrifice herself for you and a bitter disappointment may come to you. 

I didn’t say I liked it Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference. 

Yes, very sensible… People die of common sense, Dorian, one lost moment at a time. Life is a moment. There is no hereafter. So make it burn always with the hardest flame. 

The vilest deeds like poison weeds Bloom well in prison air; It is only what is good in man That wastes and withers there. 

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky. 

When good Americans die, they go to Paris” “Where do bad Americans go?” “They stay in America 

No art ever survived censorship; no art ever will. 

The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me. 

What you really are is a Bunburyist. I was quite right in saying you were a Bunburyist. You are one of the most advanced Bunburyists I know. 

An alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory. 

Schools should be the most beautiful place in every town and village-so beautiful that the punishment for undutiful children should be barred from going to school the following day. 

Plain women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women never are. They are always so occupied with being jealous of other women’s husbands. 

We in the House of Lords are never in touch with public opinion. That makes us a civilised body. 

MRS ALLONBY Is she such a mystery? LORD ILLINGWORTH She is more than a mystery – she is a mood. MRS ALLONBY Moods don’t last. LORD ILLINGWORTH It is their chief charm. 

Lord Illingworth told me this morning that there was an orchid there as beautiful as the seven deadly sins. 

LORD ILLINGWORTH What do you think she’d do if I kissed her? MRS ALLONBY Either marry you, or strike you across the face with her glove. What would you do if she struck you across the face with her glove? LORD ILLINGWORTH Fall in love with her, probably. 

LADY STUTFIELD I adore silent men. MRS ALLONBY Oh, Ernest isn’t silent. He talks the whole time. But he has got no conversation. What he talks about I don’t know. I haven’t listened to him for years. 

You shut out from your society the gentle and the good. You laugh at the simple and the pure. living, as you all do, on other and by them, you need at self-sacrifice, and if you throw bread to the poor, it is merely to keep them quiet for a season. 

My dear young lady, there was a great deal of truth; I dare say, in what you said, and you looked very pretty while you said it, which is much more important. 

But she is happiest alone. She is happiest alone. 

I don’t know how to talk. Oh! talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact. 

It was you I thought of all the time, I gave to them the love you did not need: lavished on them a love that was not theirs. 

What fire does not destroy, it hardens 

I cannot choose one hundred best books because I have only written five 

Football is all very well as a game for rough girls, but is hardly suitable for delicate boys. 

Muffins should always be eaten quite calmly, as it is the only way to eat them! 

He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression… 

I don’t want to earn a living. I want to live. 

It is a great mistake for men to give up paying compliments, for when they give up saying what is charming, they give up thinking what is charming. 

The tragedy of growing old is not that one is old but that one is young. 

The Americans are identical to the British in all respects except, of course, language. 

I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. 

Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners. 

There is only good art and mediocre art. 

The only way to even approach doing something perfectly is through experience, and experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. 

Whenever one has anything unpleasant to say, one should always be quite candid. 

Imagination is imitative-the real innovation lies in criticism. 

I never put off till tomorrow what I can do the day after. 

It is only very ugly or very beautiful women who ever hide their faces . 

Perhaps there may come into my art also, no less than into my life, a still deeper note, one of greater unity of passion, and directness of impulse. Not width but intensity is the true aim of modern art. We are no longer in art concerned with the type. It is with the exception that we have to do. I cannot put my sufferings into any form they took, I need hardly say. Art only begins where Imitation ends, but something must come into my work, of fuller memory of words perhaps, of richer cadences, of more curious effects, of simpler architectural order, of some aesthetic quality at any rate. 

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty. 

For, try as we may, we cannot get behind the appearence of things to reality. And the terrible reason may be that there is no reality in the things apart from their appearences. 

We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in Art. 

The aim of love is to love. No more, no less. 

The English public always feels perfectly at ease when a mediocrity is talking to it. 

The worst thing to do with success, is to boast about it. 

The trouble with the lower classes is that they lack the sense of tragedy given to them by the upper classes. 

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimagininative. 

The proper school to learn art is not life but art 

You can fake intelligence, but you can’t fake wit. 

Oh, how I vainly wished to the bearded man in the sky that I was Neapolitan. Why? So I could bring in a fine Neapolitan pest control to help with Queensberry’s problem before it gets out of hand. 

Education is an admirable thing. 

Intuition is a strange instinct that tells a woman she is right, whether she is or not. 

The ability of the theist to misunderstand a thing is directly proportional to the obviousness of the thing. 

It is chiefly, I regret to say, through journalism that such people find expression. I regret it because there is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. 

In England people actually try to be brilliant at breakfast. That is so dreadful of them! Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast. 

I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself do’ interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty. 

One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. 

Authority is quite degrading. 

Don’t feed the trolls; nothing fuels them so much. 

It’s either the wallpaper or me. One of us has to go. [These were his dying words.] 

I was very much disappointed in the Atlantic Ocean. 

Walt Whitman and Emerson are the poets who have given the world more than anyone else. Perhaps Whitman is not so widely read in England, but England never appreciates a poet until he is dead. 

The beautiful, passionate, ruined South, the land of magnolias and music, of roses and romance . . . living on the memory of crushing defeats 

Everybody in American seems in a rush to catch a train. 

The first thing that struck me on landing in America was that if the Americans are not the most well-dressed people in the world, they are the most comfortably dressed. 

America is the noisiest country that ever existed. One is waked up in the morning, not by the singing of the nightingale, but by the steam whistle. 

In one dancing saloon I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice: ‘Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.’ 

I wonder that no criminal has ever pleaded the ugliness of your city as an excuse for his crimes. 

America is not a country, it is a world. 

Nature….she will hang the night stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send word 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. 

She lives the poetry she cannot write. 

And when wind and winter harden All the loveless land, It will whisper of the garden, You will understand. 

I am not in favour of this modern mania for turning bad people into good people at a moment’s notice. 

You might see nothing in him. I see everything in him. 

Circumstances should never alter principles! 

memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away 

The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance. 

I don’t want to earn my living, I want to live. 

Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious. 

Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices, there are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even. 

Requiescat Tread lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow. All her bright golden hair Tarnished with rust, She that was young and fair Fallen to dust. Lily-like, white as snow, She hardly knew She was a woman, so Sweetly she grew. Coffin-board, heavy stone, Lie on her breast, I vex my heart alone She is at rest. Peace, Peace, she cannot hear Lyre or sonnet, All my life’s buried here, Heap earth upon it. 

Requiescat Tread lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow. All her bright golden hair Tarnished with rust, She that was young and fair Fallen to dust. Lily-like, white as snow, She hardly knew She was a woman, so Sweetly she grew. Coffin-board, heavy stone, Lie on her breast, I vex my heart alone She is at rest. Peace, Peace, she cannot hear Lyre or sonnet, All my life’s buried here, Heap earth upon it. 

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language. 

You can have your secret as long as I have your heart[.] 

The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul? 

Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art 

When I am in trouble, eating is the only thing that consoles me. Indeed, as any one who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink. At the present moment I am eating muffins because I am unhappy. Besides, I am particularly fond of muffins. 

I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience. 

I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood. 

this woman is a genius in the day time and a beauty at night 

Before Turner there was no fog in London. 

He is fond of being misunderstood. It gives him a post of vantage. 

I like looking at geniuses and listening to beautiful people. 

The world seemed to me fine because you were in it, and goodness more real because you lived. 

Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear. Just as vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people. And falsehoods the truths of other people. Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself. To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance. 

Life is terrible. It rules us, we do not rule it. 

I usually say what I really think. A great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood. 

Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities. 

Those who have much are often greedy; those who have little often share. 

Nowadays we are all of us so hard up that the only pleasant things to pay are compliments. They’re the only things we can pay. 

God knows; I won’t be an Oxford don anyhow. I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I’ll be famous, and if not famous, I’ll be notorious. Or perhaps I’ll lead the life of pleasure for a time and then-who knows?-rest and do nothing. What does Plato say is the highest end that man can attain here below? To sit down and contemplate the good. Perhaps that will be the end of me too. 

If it took Labouchere three columns to prove that I was forgotten, then there is no difference between fame and obscurity. 

Lo! with a little rod I did but touch the honey of romance – And must I lose a soul’s inheritance? 

The honest ratepayer and his healthy family have no doubt often mocked at the dome-like forehead of the philosopher, and laughed over the strange perspective of the landscape that lies beneath him. If they really knew who he was, they would tremble. For Chuang Ts? spent his life in preaching the great creed of Inaction, and in pointing out the uselessness of all things. 

It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal. 

Even before I met you I was far from indifferent to you. 

Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn’t there, and finding it. 

You are Beautiful when you are happy 

It is always worth while asking a question, though it is not always worth while answering one. 

Nothing is so aggravating as calmness. There is something positively brutal about the good temper of most modern men. 

Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid. 

Between the optimist and the pessimist, the difference is droll. The optimist sees the doughnut; the pessimist the hole! 

Youth! There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life’s lumber-room. But youth is the Lord of Life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it. Every one is born a king, and most people die in exile. 

I delight in men over seventy. They always offer one the devotion of a lifetime. 

My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don’t know anything at all. 

He to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives. 

If we men married the women we deserved, we should have a very bad time of it. 

Oh, why will parents always appear at the wrong time? Some extraordinary mistake in nature, I suppose. 

Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood. 

When one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people’s time, not one’s own. 

We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, that fire can purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all. 

Anyone can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend’s success. 

I may have said the same thing before… but my explanation, I am sure, will always be different. 

Science is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths. Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing. 

Alone, and without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all. 

Be yourself; everyone else is taken. 

When a love comes to an end, weaklings cry, efficient ones instantly find another love, and the wise already have one in reserve. 

Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do. 

It is very vulgar to talk about one’s own business. Only people like stockbrokers do that, and then only at dinner parties. 

I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square. 

In England … education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and would probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square. 

Scepticism is the beginning of Faith. 

An acquaintance that begins with a compliment is sure to develop into a real friendship. 

If a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. But if a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. 

To know anything about oneself one must know all about others. 

The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope. 

Oh, I do’ care about Jack. I do’ care for anybody in the whole world but you. I love you, Cecily. You will marry me, wo’ you? You silly boy! Of course. Why, we have been engaged for the last three months. For the last three months? 

LORD GORING: I am glad you have called. I am going to give you some good advice. MRS. CHEVELEY: Oh! pray don’t. One should never give a woman anything that she can’t wear in the evening. 

LORD GORING: My father told me to go to bed an hour ago. I don’t see why I shouldn’t give you the same advice. I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself. 

MRS. ALLONBY: She told me yesterday, and in quite a loud voice too, that she was only eighteen. It was most annoying. LORD ILLINGWORTH: One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that, would tell one anything. 

All that I desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. 

Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac. 

Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. 

Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility. 

I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across… Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best. The mortality among pianists in that place is marvellous. 

Once can survive everything nowadays, except death. 

Skepticism is the beginning of Faith. 

Where there is no extravagance there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding. 

Woman’s first duty in life is to her dressmaker. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered. 

Fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment the universal. 

Frank Harris has been received in all the great houses – once! 

Imagination is a quality given a man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is. 

Consistency is the last resort of the unimaginative. 

I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. 

It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes. 

Formerly we used to canonize our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable. 

Pardon me, you are not engaged to any one. When you do become engaged to some one, I, or your father, should his health permit him, will inform you of the fact. An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be. It is hardly a matter that she could be allowed to arrange for herself. 

To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune… to lose both seems like carelessness. 

A poet can survive anything but a misprint. 

Punctuality is the thief of time. Wilde I never travel without my diary. One should always have Something sensational to read in the train. 

The great things in life are what they seem to be. And for that reason, strange as it may sound to you, often are very difficult to interpret (understand). Great passion are for the great of souls. Great events can only be seen by people who are on a level with them. We think we can have our visions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing visions have to paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine. 

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the color, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better. 

Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity. 

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst; the last is a real tragedy! 

The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women merely adored. 

Work is the curse of the drinking class. 

As a pomegranate, cut in twain, White-seeded is her crimson mouth. 

And he goes through life, his mouth open, and his mind closed. 

But when they had unloosed the linen band, Which swathed the Egyptian’s body, – lo! was found, Closed in the wasted hollow of her hand, A little seed, which, sown in English ground, Did wondrous snow of starry blossoms bear, And spread rich odours through our springtide air. 

An inordinate passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young. 

Oh! no one. No one in particular. A woman of no importance. 

The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet’s dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality. 

The only charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception necessary for both parties. 

He had’ a single redeeming vice. 

Her ivory hands on the ivory keys Strayed in a fitful fantasy, Like the silver gleam when the poplar trees Rustle their pale leaves listlessly Or the drifting foam of a restless sea When the waves show their teeth in the flying breeze. 

I have my beauty, – you your Art – Nay, do not start: One world was not enough for two Like me and you. 

The wild Bee reels from bough to bough With his furry coat and his gauzy wing, Now in a lily cup, and now Setting a jacinth bell a-swing, In his wandering. 

To love one’s self is the beginning of a life-long romance. 

When the gods choose to punish us, they merely answer our prayers. 

I am in a duel to the death with this wallpaper, one of us has got to go. 

I do not approve of anything which tampers with natural ignorance. 

Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is onself. 

Set in this stormy Northern sea, Queen of these restless fields of tide, England! What shall men say of thee. Before whose feet the worlds divide? 

Its failings notwithstanding, there is much to be said in favor of journalism in that by giving us the opinion of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. 

Ah! somehow life is bigger after all Than any painted angel could we see The God that is within us! 

And all the woods are alive with the murmur and sound of spring, And the rosebud breaks into pink on the climbing briar, And the crocus bed is a quivering moon of fire Girdled round with the belt of an amethyst ring. 

Her hair is bound with myrtle leaves, (Green leaves upon her golden hair!) Green grasses through the yellow sheaves Of Autumn corn are not more fair. 

If the poor only had profiles there would be no difficulty in solving the problem of poverty. 

Argument’s are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing. 

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. 

Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about these things. What (women) like is to be a man’s last romance. 

Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything, and when they grow older, they know it. 

Those who are faithless know the pleasures of love; it is the faithful who know love’s tragedies. 

The only way a woman can ever reform her husband is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life. 

Women love men for their defects; if men have enough of them, women will forgive them anything, even their gigantic intellects. 

The yellow fog came creeping down The bridges, till the houses’ walls Seemed changed to shadows, and St. Paul’s Loomed like a bubble o’er the town. 

Anyone can make history. Only a great man can write it. 

Day by day the old order of things changes, and new modes of thought pass over our world, and it may be that, before many years, talking will have taken the place of literature, and the personal screech silenced the music of impersonal utterance. Something of the dignity of the literary calling will probably be lost, and it is perhaps a dangerous thing for a country to be too eloquent. 

To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul. 

The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart-hearts are made to be broken-but that it turns one’s heart to stone. 

As for borrowing Mr. Whistler’s ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have ever heard him express have had reference to his own superiority as a painter over painters greater than himself. 

My great mistake, the fault for which I ca’ forgive myself, is that one day I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my own individuality. 

I have been right, Basil, have’ I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth. 

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears. 

I do’ write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For my own sake I must forgive you. 

Well, I ca’ help going to see Sibyl play, even if it is only for an act. I get hungry for her presence; and when I think of the wonderful soul that is hidden away in that little ivory body, I am filled with awe.” “You can dine with me to-night, Dorian, ca’ you?” He shook his head. “To night she is Imogen,” he answered, “and tomorrow night she will be Juliet.” “When is she Sibyl Vane?” “Never.” “I congratulate you. 

Jack? . . . No, there is very little music in the name Jack, if any at all, indeed. It does not thrill. It produces absolutely no vibrations . . . I have known several Jacks, and they all, without exception, were more than usually plain. Besides, Jack is a notorious domesticity for John! And I pity any woman who is married to a man called John. She would probably never be allowed to know the entrancing pleasure of a single moment’s solitude. The only really safe name is Ernest. 

Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Do’ squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing. 

How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I ca’ make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.” “Well, I ca’ eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.” “I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances. 

Dear little Swallow,” said the Prince, “you tell me of marvelous things, but more marvelous than anything is the suffering of men and of women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery. 

Give a man a mask and he”ll tell you the truth. 

Lady Bracknell. Good afternoon, dear Algernon, I hope you are behaving very well. Algernon. I’m feeling very well, Aunt Augusta. Lady Bracknell. That’s not quite the same thing. In fact the two things rarely go together. 

I find I have, and a heart does’ suit me, Windermere. Somehow it does’ go with modern dress. It makes one look old. 

The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence. 

The burden of this world is too great for one man to bear, and the world’s sorrow too heavy for one heart to suffer. 

Man is many things, but he is not rational. 

You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter – a girl brought up with the utmost care – to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel? 

To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. 

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. 

We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes… 

There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself. I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted. 

We have quite the same ideas. No; I think our ideas are quite different. But he has been most pleasant. 

I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational. 

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance. 

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize. 

Human life-that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one’s face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams. 

Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither 

It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us. 

Thin-lipped wisdom spoke at her from the worn chair, hinted at prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose author apes the name of common sense. 

Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast. 

Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders. 

Life is one fool thing after another whereas love is two fool things after each other. 

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. 

Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval. 

I could deny it if I liked. I could deny anything if I liked. 

Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out. 

The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming. 

The one charm of the past is that it is the past. 

Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read. 

Prism! Where is that baby? 

The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable. 

There was purification in punishment. Not ‘Forgive us our sins,’ but ‘Smite us for our iniquities’ should be the prayer of a man to a most just God. 

Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know. 

When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs. 

Good heavens, I suppose a man may eat his own muffins in his own garden.” “But you have just said it was perfectly heartless to eat muffins!” “I said it was perfectly heartless of YOU under the circumstances. That is a very different thing.” “That may be, but the muffins are the same! 

For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. 

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. 

Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all. 

A method of procuring sensations? Do you think then, that a man who has once committed a murder could possibly do the same crime again? Don’t tell me that.” says Dorian. “Oh! anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often,” says Lord Henry 

Sometime you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such thing as romantic experience; there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance- that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long someday to feel 

They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about. 

She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. 

The moon in her chariot of pearl 

He wanted to be where no one would know who he was. He wanted to escape from himself. 

One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar. 

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. 

In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all. 

The only horrible thing in the world is ennui. 

Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful. 

Wisdom comes with winters 

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memories. 

Life is a nightmare that prevents one from sleeping. 

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. 

Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life…I have put only my talent into my works. 

Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. 

Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity. 

Do you really keep a diary? I’d give anything to look at it. May I? Oh, no. You see, it is simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy. 

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. 

Love is not fashionable anymore; the poets have killed it. 

Caricature is the tribute which mediocrity pays to genius. 

Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about these things. What (women) like is to be a man’s last romance. 

Salome, Salome, dance for me. I pray thee dance for me. I am sad to-night. Yes, I am passing sad to-night. When I came hither I slipped in blood, which is an evil omen; and I heard, I am sure I heard in the air a beating of wings, a beating of giant wings. I cannot tell what they mean …. I am sad to-night. Therefore dance for me. Dance for me, Salome, I beseech you. If you dance for me you may ask of me what you will, and I will give it you, even unto the half of my kingdom. 

To get back one’s youth one has merely to repeat one’s follies. 

If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first. 

I have learned this: it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one becomes as a consequence of it. 

Long engagements give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage, which is never advisable. 

You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear. 

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias. 

There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination, and disobedience its charm. 

A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature. 

Time is a waste of money. 

To be really mediaeval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes. 

A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it. 

If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out. 

I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real. 

Never met such a Gorgon . . . I don’t really know what a Gorgon is like, but I am quite sure that Lady Bracknell is one. In any case, she is a monster, without being a myth, which is rather unfair. 

I am sick of women who love one. Women who hate one are much more interesting. 

But whether I become a believer or remain an agnostic, my belief or disbelief must derive its source from within, not from without. I, myself, must create its symbols. The transcendental is that which produces its own form. I will never discover its secret if I do not find it in my own heart; if I do not possess it already I shall never be able to acquire it. 

you will always love, and you will always be loved 

Death is a great price to pay for a red rose”, cried the Nightingale, “and Life is very dear to all. ” It is pleasant to sit in the green wood, and watch the Sun in his chariot of gold, and the Moon in her chariot of pearl. Sweet is the scent oft he hawthorn, and sweet are the bluebells that hide in the valley, and the heather that blows on the hill. Yet Love is better than Life, and what is the heart of a bird compared to the heart of a man? 

Any place you love is the world to you”, explained the pensive Catherine Wheel, who had been attached to an old deal box in early life, and prided herself on her broken heart; “but love is not fashionable any more, the poets have killed it. They wrote so much about that nobody believed them, and I am not surprised. True love suffers, and is silent. I remember myself once- But it is no matter now. Romance is a thing of the past. 

Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived. 

You are more to me than any of them has any idea; you are the atmosphere of beauty through which I see life; you are the incarnation of all lovely things…I think of you day and night. ~ Letter to Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas 

Well, I don’t like your clothes. You look perfectly ridiculous in them. Why on earth don’t you go up and change? It’s perfectly childish to be in mourning for a man who is actually staying a whole week with you in your house as a guest. I call it grotesque. 

Nature is a wet place where large numbers of ducks fly overhead uncooked. 

Fruitcake is like semen, there’s a lot of it about but no one wants to swallow it 

Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan, and sail ’round the high-pooped galleys… Dragons will wander about the waste places, and the phoenix will soar from her nest of fire into the air. We shall lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the toad’s head. Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand in our stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happen, of things that are not and that should be. 

Pleasure is the only thing one should live for, nothing ages like happiness. 

Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. 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 cleance me in the great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole. 

What is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means? 

The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature. 

People fashion their God after their own understanding. They make their God first and worship him afterwards. 

Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play… I tell you, that it is on things like these that our lives depend. 

They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. 

Experience is a question of instinct about life. 

Love is easily killed. 

When bankers get together they talk about art. When artists get together, they talk about money. 

Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing. 

I never take any notice to what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. 

Her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good. 

Now produce your explanation and pray make it improbable. 

Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer. 

I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes. 

A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say at the age of eighteen. 

If people were meant to be nude, they would have been born this way. 

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring. 

If you don’t get everything you want, think of the things you don’t get that you don’t want. 

I am not at all cynical, I have merely got experience, which, however, is very much the same thing. 

Never regret thy fall, O Icarus of the fearless flight For the greatest tragedy of them all Is never to feel the burning light. 

Down the long and silent street, The dawn, with silver-sandaled feet, Crept like a frightened girl. 

Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous. 

I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me. 

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art. 

And the marvellous rose became crimson, like the rose of the eastern sky. Crimson was the girdle of petals, and crimson as a ruby was the heart 

Artists, like the Greek gods, are only revealed to one another. 

The great events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion. We reject the burden of their memory, and have anodynes against them. But the little things, the things of no moment, remain with us. In some tiny ivory cell the brain stores the most delicate, and the most fleeting impressions. 

I like talking to a brick wall- it’s the only thing in the world that never contradicts me! 

My life-my whole life- take it, and do with it what you will. I love you-love you as I have never loved any living thing. From the moment I met you I loved you, loved you blindly, adoringly,madly! You didn’t know it then-you know it now. 

The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion-these are the two things that govern us. 

The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic. 

If one doesn’t talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression that gives reality to things. 

Civilization is not by means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. 

It is so easy to convince others; it is so difficult to convince oneself. 

All great ideas are dangerous. 

I am always late on principle, my principle being that punctuality is the thief of time. 

Good taste is the excuse I’ve always given for leading such a bad life 

What a silly thing love is! It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything and it is always telling one things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. 

Create yourself. Be yourself your poem. 

Reported as Oscar Wilde’s last words on his death bed… This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has to go. 

Duty is what one expects from others. 

And her sweet red lips on these lips of mine Burned like the ruby fire set In the swinging lamp of a crimson shrine, Or the bleeding wounds of the pomegranate, Or the heart of the lotus drenched and wet With the spilt-out blood of the rose-red wine. 

You silly Arthur! If you knew anything about…anything, which you don’t, you would know that I adore you. Everyone in London knows it except you. It is a public scandal the way I adore you. I have been going about for the last six months telling the whole of society that I adore you. I wonder you consent to have anything to say to me. I have no character left at all. At least, I feel so happy that I am quite sure I have no character left at all. 

sorrow…is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it 

When you really want love you will find it waiting for you. 

I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. 

To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul. 

The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me. 

What the artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals. 

The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart-hearts are made to be broken-but that it turns one’s heart to stone. 

Every one is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling. 

Art only begins where Imitation ends. 

All the spring may be hidden in the single bud, and the low ground nest of the lark may hold the joy that is to herald the feet of many rose-red dawns. 

It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. 

I tremble with pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me. 

It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with yourrose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame… 

With subtle and finely-wrought temperaments it is always so. Their strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and the sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude. 

A kiss may ruin a human life 

A man who takes himself too seriously will find that no one else takes him seriously. 

She had a passion for secrecy, but she herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret. 

The supreme vice is shallowness. 

God grant me the serenity to accept that people are ignorant, the courage to uphold the law when I’m hostile, & the wisdom to realize that murder is illegal. 

Bad artists always admire each others work. 

What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise 

Young men want to be faithful, and are not. Old men want to be faithless, and cannot. 

Dear Prince, I must leave you, but I will never forget you, and next spring I will bring you back two beautiful jewels in place of those you have given away. The ruby shall be redder than a red rose, and the sapphire shall be as blue as the great sea. 

The nineteenth century is a turning point in history, simply on account of the work of two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of Nature, the other the critic of the books of God. Not to recognise this is to miss the meaning of one of the most important eras in the progress of the world. 

Medievalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods – Medievalism is real Christianity, and the medieval Christ is the real Christ. 

What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb. American novels, answered Lord Henry. 

Why can’t these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women. It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it. 

Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything. Yes, murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; and when they grow older they know it. 

The secret to life is to enjoy the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived. 

Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer. 

It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution. 

A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave. 

I can’t help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves. 

Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. 

Youth is the only thing worth having. 

Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it comes into existence. 

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different. 

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. 

Life is the art of being well deceived, and to succeed, it must be habitual and uninterrupted. 

You must have a cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want? 

The heart was made to be broken. 

The bright dawn flooded the room, and swept the fantastic shadows into dusky corners, where they lay shuddering. 

When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring. 

My dear fellow, the truth isn’t quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl. What extraordinary ideas you have about the way to behave to a woman! 

I’ll bet you anything you like that half an hour after they have met, they will be calling each other sister. Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first. 

Cecily. This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade. Gwendolen. [Satirically.] I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different. 

You have filled my tea with lumps of sugar, and though I asked most distinctly for bread and butter, you have given me cake. I am known for the gentleness of my disposition, and the extraordinary sweetness of my nature, but I warn you, Miss Cardew, you may go too far. 

This ghastly state of things is what you call Bunburying, I suppose? Algernon. Yes, and a perfectly wonderful Bunbury it is. The most wonderful Bunbury I have ever had in my life. Jack. Well, you’ve no right whatsoever to Bunbury here. Algernon. That is absurd. One has a right to Bunbury anywhere one chooses. Every serious Bunburyist knows that. 

Come, dear, [Gwendolen rises] we have already missed five, if not six, trains. To miss any more might expose us to comment on the platform. 

I never change, except in my affections. 

The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. It ends with Revelations. 

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them. 

Punctuality is the thief of time 

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words? 

This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go. 

Yet each man kills the thing he loves By each let this be heard Some do it with a bitter look Some with a flattering word The coward does it with a kiss The brave man with a sword 

There are two ways to dislike poetry: One is to dislike it; the other is to read Pope. 

Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace. 

Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future. 

Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that. 

The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer. 

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you. 

I don’t want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there. 

Some things are too important to be taken seriously. 

Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is [hu]man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. 

The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history. 

She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm. 

The sky was pure opal now. 

I know. In fact, I am never wrong. 

I like men who have a future and women who have a past. 

The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms. 

The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream. 

Hearts Live By Being Wounded 

A passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young. 

The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork. 

Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself. 

Everything in moderation, including moderation. 

To become a spectator of one’s own life is to escape the suffering of life. 

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography. 

Truth is independent of facts always. 

To define is to limit. 

There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make one almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. 

It would leave no room for developments and I intend to develop in many directions. 

The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving. 

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing. 

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious. 

Its a beautiful woman’s fate to be the subject of conversation where ever she goes 

Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them. 

And alien tears will fill for him pity’s long broken urn. For his mourners will all be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn. 

There are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. 

Every woman is a rebel. 

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. 

Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation. 

The worst of it is that I am perpetually being punished for nothing; this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me. It’s perfectly awful to let the mind grind itself away between the upper and nether millstones of regret and remorse without respite; with books my life would be livable – any life. 

For he who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die. 

Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer. 

Life is too short to learn German 

It is a curious fact that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously 

It takes great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it. 

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. 

Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing. 

Lawyers have been known to wrest from reluctant juries triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even when those clients, as often happens, were clearly and unmistakably innocent. 

Really, this horrid House of Commons quite ruins our husbands for us. I think the Lower House by far the greatest blow to a happy married life that there has been since that terrible thing called the Higher Education of Women was invented. 

Ah! that quite does for me. I haven’t a word to say… Too much care was taken with our education, I am afraid. To have been well brought up is a great drawback nowadays. It shuts one out from so much. 

And, as for what is called improving conversation, that is merely the foolish method by which the still more foolish philanthropist feebly tries to disarm the just rancour of the criminal classes. 

As a rule, I think they are quite impossible. Geniuses talk so much, don’t they? Such a bad habit! And they are always thinking about themselves, when I want them to be thinking about me. 

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. 

However, I think anything is better than high intellectual pressure. That is the most unbecoming thing there is. It makes the noses of the young girls so particularly large. 

I am afraid that we are beginning to be over-educated; at least everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching -that is really what our enthusiasm for education has come to. 

I am afraid that you have been listening to the conversation of someone older than yourself. That is always a dangerous thing to do, and if you allow it to degenerate into a habit, you will find it absolutely fatal to any intellectual development. 

I am thoroughly sick of pearls. They make one look so plain, so good and so intellectual. 

The English mind is always in a rage. The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians. 

Women have become so highly educated… that nothing should surprise us nowadays, except happy marriages. 

Just as the philanthropist is the nuisance of the ethical sphere, so the nuisance of the intellectual sphere is the man who is so occupied in trying to educate others, that he has never had any time to educate himself. 

That beauty which is meant by art is no mere accident of human life which people can take or leave, but a positive necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant us to, that is to say unless we are content to be less than men. 

What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. 

Outcasts always mourn. 

Somehow or other I’ll be famous, and if not famous, I’ll be notorious. 

The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. 

And suddenly the moon withdraws her sickle from the lightening skies, and to her sombre cavern flies, wrapped in a veil of yellow gauze. 

I am always astonishing myself. It is the only thing that makes life worth living. 

The growing influence of women is the one reassuring thing in our political life. 

An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant as the case may be. 

No gentleman ever has any money. 

And all, but Lust, is turned to dust In Humanity’s machine. 

Set in this stormy Northern sea, Queen of these restless fields of tide, England! what shall men say of thee, Before whose feet the worlds divide? 

Fool, nothing is impossible in Russia but reform. 

Sooner or later we have all to pay for what we do. 

I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex. 

I like Wagner’s music better than anybody’s. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says. 

Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level. 

She is a peacock in everything but beauty! 

Miss Prism: Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days. Cecily: Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily? I don’t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much. Miss Prism: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means. 

How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in? 

A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle. 

Men know life too early. Women know life too late. That is the difference between men and women. 

Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect – simply a confession of failures. 

I don’t like compliments, and I don’t see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn’t mean. 

Just because a man has died for it, does not make it true. 

Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets. 

I analyzed you, though you did not adore me. 

It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don’t mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind. -Algernon 

Popularity is the one insult I have never suffered. 

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic. 

What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. 

Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed. 

The proper basis for marriage is a mutual misunderstanding. 

Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . . 

To shut one’s eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice. 

To be popular one must be a mediocrity. 

Oh, I don’t care about Jack. I don’t care for anybody in the whole world but you. I love you, Cecily. You will marry me, won’t you? You silly boy! Of course. Why, we have been engaged for the last three months. For the last three months? 

His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion. 

Out of the unreal shadows of night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off… p 207 

When he takes the knife to the canvass the servants find him lying dead with a knife through is heart and “withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage.” and the portrait “in all the wonders of his exquisite youth and beauty.” p 349 

Oscar Wilde was suing the Marquis of Queensbury in 1895 for libel accusing Wilde of homosexuality Counsel: Have you ever adored a young man madly? Wilde: I have never given adoration to anyone except myself. 

With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy? 

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable. 

And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand, The hand that held the steel: For only blood can wipe out blood, And only tears can heal 

Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects. 

We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities. 

The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously-and have somebody find out. 

Hear no evil, speak no evil, and you won’t be invited to cocktail parties. 

When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it. 

It’s the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. 

Jack: Actually, I was found. Lady Bracknell: Found? Jack: Uh, yes, I was in… a handbag. Lady Bracknell: A handbag? Jack: Yes, it was… [makes gestures] Jack: an ordinary handbag. 

Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. 

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others. 

If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you. 

Where there is no love there is no understanding. 

Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginitive 

Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority. 

It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world 

A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company. 

The very essence of romance is uncertainty. 

It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees. It makes life too full of terrors. 

In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. 

Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness. 

One should always be a little improbable. 

Life cheats us with shadows. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us with bitterness and disappointment in its train. 

If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners, she doesn’t deserve to have any. 

It is perfectly monstrous,’ he said, at last, ‘the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one’s back that are absolutely and entirely true. 

My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people’s. 

Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.” “I hate them for it,” cried Hallward. “An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray. 

I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them. 

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. 

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace. 

Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. 

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. 

In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press. 

The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet’s dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality. 

The English country gentleman galloping after the fox – the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable. 

The great events of the world take place in the brain… 

I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent engagement. 

He hadn’t a single redeeming vice. 

I must say… that I ruined myself: and that nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand. 

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. 

If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life. 

When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is. 

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. 

Women are made to be loved, not understood. 

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes. 

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future. 

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 them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything. 

How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being. 

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one. 

I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best. 

Always forgive your enemies – nothing annoys them so much. 

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known. 

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. 

Men always want to be a woman’s first love – women like to be a man’s last romance. 

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals. 

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. 

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

If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn’t. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism. 

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go. 

True friends stab you in the front. 

Memory… is the diary that we all carry about with us. 

A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally. 

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! 

He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize 

Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword! Some kill their love when they are young, And some when they are old; Some strangle with the hands of Lust, Some with the hands of Gold: The kindest use a knife, because The dead so soon grow cold. Some love too little, some too long, Some sell, and others buy; Some do the deed with many tears, And some without a sigh: For each man kills the thing he loves, Yet each man does not die. 

It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time. Perhaps, as Harry says, a really grande passion is the privilege of those who have nothing to do, and that is the use of the idle classes in a country 

Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping. 

It is sweet to dance to violins When love and life are fair: To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes Is delicate and rare: But it is not sweet with nimble feet To dance upon the air! 

The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. 

Lean on principles, one day they’ll end up giving way. 

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. 

I am not laughing, Dorian; at least I am not laughing at you. But you should not say the greatest romance of your life. You should say the first romance of your life. You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do. That is the one use of the idle classes of a country. Don’t be afraid. There are exquisite things in store for you. This is merely the beginning. 

My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect-simply a confession of failures. Faithfulness! I must analyse it some day. The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up. But I don’t want to interrupt you. Go on with your story. 

Music is the art… which most completely realizes the artistic idea and is the condition to which all the other arts are constantly aspiring. 

Well I won’t argue about the matter. You always want to argue about things. That is exactly what things were originally made for. 

To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up. 

The world belongs to the discontented. 

Never so sweet a repast as the Reaper’s when you tread upon the threshold of a Quiznos. 

Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it. 

If there is anything more annoying in the world than having people talk about you, it is certainly having no one talk about you. 

It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue. 

All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon. 

What of Art? -It is a malady. -Love? -An Illusion. -Religion? -The fashionable substitute for Belief. -You are a sceptic. -Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith. -What are you? -To define is to limit. 

You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know. 

My great mistake, the fault for which I can’t forgive myself, is that one day I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my own individuality. 

How does one cure the soul? Through the senses 

What you read when you don’t have to… 

The true artist is known by what he annexes, and he annexes everything. 

Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth. The God of this century is wealth. To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must have wealth. 

I am tired of myself to-night. I should like to be somebody else. 

I have been right, Basil, haven’t I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth. 

Liberty is the chosen resort of the artistic shopper. 

Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good. 

People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity. 

As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that. 

In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor. 

I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man. 

I beg your pardon I didn’t recognise you – I’ve changed a lot. 

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears. 

A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks. 

If one were to live his life fully and completely were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream. 

If you are going to tell people the truth, you had better make them laugh or they will kill you. 

But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. 

What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace. they would defile it, and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It would be always alive. (Dorian Gray regarding his portrait) 

There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtures are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. 

The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty, and to someone else if she is plain. 

Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways. 

He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals. 

Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar 

Even things that are true can be proved. 

She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain. 

A man who marries without knowing Bunbury has a very tedious time of it. 

Do you smoke? Well, yes, I must admit I smoke. I’m glad to hear of it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind. 

I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven’t got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die. 

Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me? 

Either this wallpaper goes, or I do. 

It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one’s worship into words. 

Bunbury? Oh, he was quite exploded. Exploded! Was he the victim of a revolutionary outrage? I was not aware that Mr. Bunbury was interested in social legislation. If so, he is well punished for his morbidity. My dear Aunt Augusta, I mean he was found out! The doctors found out that Bunbury could not , that is what I mean-so Bunbury died. He seems to have had great confidence in the opinion of his physicians. 

There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one’s soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one’s own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one’s temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that-perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims…. 

Some things are more precious because they don’t last long. 

You and I will always be friends.” “Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that. 

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. 

It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them. 

She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy. 

My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go. 

Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to someone who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer’s day. 

But then one regrets the loss even of one’s worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one’s personality. 

Can they feel, I wonder, those white silent people we call the dead? 

I had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel. 

There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful. 

Oh! I don’t think I would like to catch a sensible man. I shouldn’t know what to talk to him about. 

When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also. 

Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event. 

How clever are you, my dear! You never mean a single word you say! 

If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first. 

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn. 

Many people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one’s self over poetry is an honor. 

My friend is not allowed to go out today. I sit by his side and read him passages from his own life. They fill him with surprise. Everyone should keep someone else’s diary; I sometimes suspect you of keeping mine. 

I am sorry my life is so marred and maimed by extravagance. But I cannot live otherwise. I, at any rate, pay the penalty of suffering. 

I feel that if I kept it secret it might grow in my mind (as poisonous things grow in the dark) and take its place with the other terrible thoughts that gnaw me 

He is really not so ugly after all, provided, of course, that one shuts one’s eyes, and does not look at him. 

People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it’s impossible to count them accurately. 

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions. 

In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer. 

I really don’t see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I’ll certainly try to forget the fact. 

The sick do not ask if the hand that smoothes their pillow is pure, nor the dying care if the lips that touch their brow have known the kiss of sin. 

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered. 

For one moment our lives met, our souls touched. 

Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that we should live. 

In war,” answered the weaver, “the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children fade away before their time, and the faces of those we love become hard and evil. We tread out the grapes, another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board is empty. We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and are slaves, though men call us free. 

Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary. 

I did not think I should be ever loved: do you indeed Love me so much as now you say you do? Ask of the sea-bird if it loves the sea, Ask of the roses if they love the rain, Ask of the little lark, that will not sing Till day break, if it loves to see the day: And yet, these are but empty images, Mere shadows of my love, which is a fire So great that all the waters of the main Can not avail to quench it. 

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art. 

I was wrong. God’s law is only Love. 

Indeed, so far from being humorous, the male American is the most abnormally serious creature who ever existed.. It is only fair to admit that he can exaggerate, but even his exaggeration has a rational basis. It is not founded on wit or fancy; it does not spring from any poetic imagination. 

The security of Society lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of the stability of Society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence of any intelligence amongst its members. 

Foxhunting… the unspeakable pursuing the inedible. 

And, by the way, one of the most delightful things I find in America is meeting a people without prejudice – everywhere open to the truth. 

The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us. 

While to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all. 

In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust. 

Comfort is the only thing our civilization can give us. 

We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone. 

The evil that machinery is doing is not merely in the consequence of its work but in the fact that it makes men themselves machines also. 

To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger; and danger has become so rare in modern life. 

There is a tiny yellow daffodil, The butterfly can see it from afar, Although one summer evening’s dew could fill Its little cup twice over, ere the star Had called the lazy shepherd to his fold, And be no prodigal. 

Newspapers. . . give us the bald, sordid, disgusting facts of life. They chronicle, with degrading avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details. . . 

Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labor. 

Things are in their essence what we choose to make them. A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it. 

Extravagance is the luxury of the poor; penury is the luxury of the rich. 

Of course I have played outdoor games. I once played dominoes in an open air cafe in Paris. 

You are young. No hungry generations tread you down. The past does not mock you with the ruins of a beauty the secret of whose creation you have lost 

Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance 

A book or poem which has no pity in it had better not be written. 

Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude. 

There is no such thing as romance in our day, women have become too brilliant; nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman. 

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. 

It is what we fear that happens to us. 

I live constantly in the fear of not being misunderstood. 

Varnishing is the only artistic process with which Royal Academicians are thoroughly familiar. 

It is absurd to say that the age of miracles is past. It has not yet begun. 

I put my talent in my work, I save my Genius for my life. 

By the artificial separation of soul and body men have invented a Realism that is vulgar and an Idealism that is void. 

Life! Life! Don’t let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. Life makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite. 

It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves. 

The final mystery is oneself… Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul. 

Philosophies fall away like sand, and creeds follow on another like the withered leaves of Autumn. 

To stake all one’s life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not – there is no weakness in that. 

To be premature is to be perfect 

To have ruined one’s self over poetry is an honour 

A daughter is a mother’s gender partner, her closest ally in the family confederacy, an extension of herself. -Author Unknown As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied. 

The Governor was strong upon The Regulation Act: The Doctor said that Death was but A scientific fact: And twice a day the Chaplain called, And left a little tract. 

The story of mankind began in a garden and ended in revelations. 

The wild Bee reels from bough to bough With his furry coat and his gauzy wing, Now in a lily cup, and now Setting a jacinth bell a-swing, In his wandering. 

The 19thc hatred of Realism is Caliban’s enraged reaction to seeing his own face in the mirror. The 19thc rejection of Romanticism is Caliban’s fury at not seeing his face reflected in the mirror. 

So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape. 

My sweet rose, my delicate flower, my lily of lilies, it is perhaps in prison that I am going to test the power of love. I am going to see if I cannot make the bitter warders sweet by the intensity of the love I bear you. I have had moments when I thought it would be wise to separate. Ah! Moments of weakness and madness! Now I see that would have mutilated my life, ruined my art, broken the musical chords which make a perfect soul. Even covered with mud I shall praise you, from the deepest abysses I shall cry to you. In my solitude you will be with me. 

At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets. 

Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything. 

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it. To the great poet, there is only one method of music – his own. To the great painter, there is only one manner of painting – that which he himself employs. The aesthetic critic, and the aesthetic critic alone, can appreciate all forms and all modes. It is to him that Art makes her appeal. 

The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes. 

London is full of women who trust their husbands. One can always recognize them. They look so thoroughly unhappy. 

There are moments when art attains almost to the dignity of manual labor. 

[T]he recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain, not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing is to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. 

If property had simply pleasures, we could stand it; but its duties make it unbearable. In the interest of the rich we must get rid of it. 

Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on. 

Bad artists always admire each other’s work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected. 

Better the rule of One, whom all obey, than to let clamorous demagogues betray our freedom with the kiss of anarchy. 

Marriage is the one subject on which all women agree and all men disagree. 

Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets. 

A man’s very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life. 

Who is that man over there? I don’t know him. What is he doing? Is he a conspirator? Have you searched him? Give him till tomorrow to confess, then hang him! – hang him! 

There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People. 

Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things. 

Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness. 

The mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value. 

The American father is never seen in London. He passes his life entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by means of a telegram in cipher. 

Like two doomed ships that pass in storm we had crossed each other’s way: but we made no sign, we said no word, we had no word to say. 

I’m sure I don’t know half the people who come to my house. Indeed, from all I hear, I shouldn’t like to. 

On the whole, the great success of marriage in the States is due partly to the fact that no American man is ever idle, and partly to the fact that no American wife is considered responsible for the quality of her husband’s dinners. 

They flaunt their conjugal felicity in one’s face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins. 

Newspapers have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon. 

For an artist to marry his model is as fatal as for a gourmet to marry his cook: the one gets no sittings, and the other gets no dinners. 

If a man needs an elaborate tombstone in order to remain in the memory of his country, it is clear that his living at all was an act of absolute superfluity. 

The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art. 

Only people who look dull ever get into the House of Commons, and only people who are dull ever succeed there. 

He thinks like a Tory, and talks like a Radical, and that’s so important nowadays. 

Only mediocrities progress. An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which is no less perfect than the last. 

What between the duties expected of one during one’s lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one’s death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up. That’s all that can be said about land. 

Yes, I am a thorough republican. No other form of government is so favorable to the growth of art. 

The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out. 

Lots of people act well, but few people talk well. This shows that talking is the more difficult of the two. 

The greatest of all sins is stupidity. 

Vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people. 

The morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. 

If art is to have a special train, the critic must keep some seats reserved on it. 

What is beautiful is a joy for all seasons … 

They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. 

Never buy a thing you don’t want merely because it is dear. 

A beggar hates his benefactor as much as he hates himself for begging. 

Artists reproduce themselves or each other, with wearisome iteration. But criticism is always moving on, and the critic is always developing. 

Action is limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams. 

Children have a natural antipathy to books- handicraft should be the basis of education. Boys and girls should be taught to use their hands to make something, and they would be less apt to destroy and be mischievous. 

We live in the age of the overworked and the undereducated. 

When I went to America I had two secretaries, one for autographs, one for locks of hair. Within six months the one had died of writer’s cramp, the other was completely bald. 

Life under a good government is rarely dramatic; life under a bad government is always so. 

Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob. It is through the voice of one crying in the wilderness that the ways of the gods must be prepared. 

Every prison that men build Is built with bricks of shame, And bound with bars lest Christ should see How men their brothers maim. 

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. 

Perhaps one never seems so much at ones ease as when one has to play a part. 

Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. 

The only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes. 

Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore. 

Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation. 

The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth. 

Every thing to be true must become a religion. 

Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly 

There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as in America. 

It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist’s life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself. 

No publisher should ever express an opinion on the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide. I can quite understand how any ordinary critic would be strongly prejudiced against a work that was accompanied by a premature and unnecessary panegyric from the publisher. A publisher is simply a useful middle-man. It is not for him to anticipate the verdict of criticism. 

The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices. 

The Ideal Man should talk to us as if we were goddesses, and treat us as if we were children. He should refuse all our serious requests, and gratify every one of our whims. He should encourage us to have caprices, and forbid us to have missions. He should always say much more than he means, and always mean much more than he says. 

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one’s cell, as it is always twilight in one’s heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more. 

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of one’s neighbour that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will probably think differently. If he cannot think, it is monstrous to require thought of any kind from him. 

Nature: a place where birds fly around uncooked 

The great things in life are what they seem to be. And for that reason, strange as it may sound to you, often are very difficult to interpret (understand). Great passions are for the great of souls. Great events can only be seen by people who are on a level with them. We think we can have our visions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing visions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine. 

There is no such thing as morality or immorality in thought. There is immoral emotion. 

A person who, because he has corns himself, always treads on other people’s toes. 

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments. 

There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them… 

The man who says he has exhausted life generally means that life has exhausted him. 

Talk to a woman as if you loved her, and to a man as if he bored you. 

There is only one real tragedy in a woman’s life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband. 

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for. 

…The two great turning-points of my life were when my father sent to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison. 

Yet, even for us, there is left some loveliness of environment, and the dullness of tutors and professors matters very little when one can loiter in the grey cloisters at Magdalen, and listen to some flute-like voice singing in Waynfleete’s chapel, or lie in the green meadow, among the strange snakespotted fritillaries, and watch the sunburnt noon smite to a finer gold the tower’s gilded vanes, or wander up the Christ Church staircase beneath the vaulted ceiling’s shadowy fans, or pass through the sculptured gateway of Laud’s building in the College of St. John. 

I envy you going to Oxford: it is the most flower-like time of one’s life. One sees the shadow of things in silver mirrors. Later on, one sees the Gorgon’s head, and one suffers, because it does not turn one to stone. 

In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other. 

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One 

How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver. 

Everything that is popular is wrong. 

He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood. 

Bad manners make a journalist. 

If one hears bad music, it is one’s duty to drown it by one’s conversation. 

Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong. 

It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. 

Marriage is a long, dull meal with dessert served at the beginning. 

To make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing. 

It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest. 

All trials are trials for one’s life, just as all sentences are sentences of death. 

And now, I am dying beyond my means. (Said while sipping champagne on his deathbed.) 

We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brim – objects press around us, filling the mind with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death. 

As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognize the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection. 

The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth. 

It is only through Art and through Art only that we can realize our perfection; Through Art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence. 

Something was dead in each of us, and what was dead was hope 

If God really wanted to punish, he’d answer all our prayers. 

If only the picture could grow old, and I stay young. For that…for that, I would give my SOUL for that. 

Bigamy ? It’s having one wife too much… …Monogamy ? It’s the same. 

Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices. 

It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man’s deeper nature is soon found out. 

He rides in the row at ten o clock in the morning, goes to the Opera three times a week, changes his clothes at least five times a day, and dines out every night of the season. You don’t call that leading an idle life, do you? 

Don’t give a woman advice; one should never give a woman anything she can’t wear in the evening. 

Sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of sympathy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain. 

I adore political parties. They are the only place left to us where people don’t talk politics. 

Men become old, but they never become good. 

Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones. 

I prefer women with a past. They’re always so damned amusing to talk to. 

Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualification. 

Reforms in Russia are very tragic, but they always end in a farce. 

They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist. 

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. 

Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. 

The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance. 

As yet, Bernard Shaw hasn’t become prominent enough to have any enemies, but none of his friends like him. 

A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life. 

No crime is vulgar, but all vulgarity is crime. 

Sin is the only real colour element left in modern life. 

I wrote when I did not know life; now that I do know the meaning of life, I have no more to write. Life cannot be written; life can only be lived. 

Do not be afraid of the past. If people tell you that it is irrevocable, do not believe them. The past, the present and the future are but one moment in the sight of God, in whose sight we should try to live. Time and space, succession and extension, are merely accidental conditions of thought. The imagination can transcend them. 

I could never quite accustom myself to absinthe, but it suits my style so well 

The birds did not understand a single word of what he was saying, but that made no matter, for they put their heads on one side, and looked wise, which is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier. 

Fantastic shadows of birds 

Now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. 

Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. 

We Irish will never achieve anything; but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks 

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. 

The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. 

The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. 

The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art. 

If God wished to punish us, all he would need to do would be to answer our prayers. 

Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical. 

George Moore wrote brilliant English until he discovered grammar. 

Only good questions deserve good answers. 

Bore: a man who is never unintentionally rude. 

Education is very admirable but let us not forget that anything worth knowing cannot be taught. 

Whenever life sucks, remember you’re going to die someday. 

Love is like a war; easy to start but hard to end and you never know where it might take you. 

Give me the luxuries and I can dispense with the necessities. 

I know not whether Laws be right, Or whether Laws be wrong; All that we know who be in jail Is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, A year whose days are long. 

Genius is born-not paid 

At every single moment of one’s life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been. 

I won’t belong to a club that accepts me as a member 

Every woman is wrong until she cries. 

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility! 

All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything, you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of. 

Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner. 

As one reads history … one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted. 

A community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurence of crime. 

I expect I shall have to die beyond my means. 

Nobody ever commits a crime without doing something stupid. 

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic – a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us. 

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one’s mind. It becomes a pleasure. 

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure. 

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one’s own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography. 

Love is a misunderstanding between two fools. 

The one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action. 

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight. 

When a man does exactly what a woman expects him to do she doesn’t think much of him. One should always do what a woman doesn’t expect, just as one should say what she doesn’t understand. 

Dammit Sir, it’s your duty to get married. You can’t always be living for pleasure! 

To look at a thing is very different from seeing it. 

It takes a thoroughly good woman to do a thoroughly stupid thing 

I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful, and that all beautiful things are made by those who strive to make something useful. 

Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all. 

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. 

Though of all poses a moral pose is the most offensive, still to have a pose at all is something. 

I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house-tops. 

The job of the critic is to report to us his moods. 

I can’t stand people that do not take food seriously. 

It is personalities not principles that move the age. 

The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction. 

It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you place the blame. 

I walk the world in wonder. 

The truth is never pure and rarely simple. 

Your machinery is beautiful. Your society people have apologized to me for the envious ridicule with which your newspapers have referred to me. Your newspapers are comic but never amusing. Your Water Tower is a castellated monstrosity with pepperboxes stuck all over it. I am amazed that any people could so abuse Gothic art and make a structure not like a water tower but like a tower of a medieval castle. It should be torn down. It is a shame to spend so much money on buildings with such an unsatisfactory result. Your city looks positively dreary. 

The best one can say of modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality. 

The supreme object of life is to live. Few people live. It is true life only to realize one’s own perfection, to make one’s every dream a reality. 

As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime. 

One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. 

I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to say so. … Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still. 

As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest. 

Life is a great disappointment. 

If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart. 

It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of the world, whatever may be the explanation of the next. 

Im Krieg machen die Starken die Schwachen zu Sklaven, im Frieden machen die Reichen die Armen zu Sklaven. 

Now and then it is a joy to have one’s table red with wine and roses. 

Her love was trembling in laughter on her lips. 

While one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal. The first personality, which no one should copy. 

It is absurd to say that there are neither ruins nor curiosities in America when they have their mothers and their manners. 

In England it is enough for a man to try and produce any serious, beautiful work to lose all his rights as a citizen. 

Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching. 

The English public takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral. 

Simple pleasures are the last healthy refuge in a complex world. 

In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth. 

I live in terror of not being misunderstood. 

I like to do all the talking myself. It saves time, and prevents arguments. 

There is more to be said for stupidity than people imagine. Personally I have a great admiration for stupidity. It is a sort of fellow-feeling, I suppose. 

Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilization. 

To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die. 

His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be 

A process which makes one rogue cleverer than another. 

It’s not hard to get the ideas when they come. They just come… it’s painful waiting for them. 

The quivering, ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing. 

It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done. 

The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are. 

I never saw so many well-dressed, well-fed, business-looking Bohemians in my life. 

It is awfully hard work doing nothing. 

Rugby is a good occasion for keeping thirty bullies far from the center of the city. 

The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ 

To have friends, you know, one need only be good-natured; but when a man has no enemy left there must be something mean about him. 

Always! That is the dreadful word … it is a meaningless word, too. 

It is not the prisoners who need reformation, it is the prisons. 

The only real people are the people who never existed. 

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. 

Chrysanthemums from gilded argosy Unload their gaudy senseless merchandise. 

Missionaries are going to reform the world whether it wants to or not. 

In a temple everything should be serious except the thing that is being worshiped. 

Starvation, not sin, is the parent of modern crime. 

Men of thoughts should have nothing to do with action. 

There are only two kinds of women, the plain and the coloured. 

Do not forget that small daily actions do or undo character. 

I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction. 

The key to making up Oscar Wilde quotes is to add ‘~ Oscar Wilde’ at the end. 

The only thing worse than quoting me, is not quoting me 

I tried to visit Albania but I couldn’t find it on the map. 

I have nothing to declare but my genius, and this four-kilo bag of cocaine. 

No one expects the Spanish Inquisition! 

She doth mean the earth to me! By earth, I actually mean dust. 

Full frontal nudity is reserved for Adam and Eve! 

Veni vidi veni iterum! (I came, I saw, I came again!) 

God is love, love is blind, Stevie Wonder is blind, therefore Stevie Wonder is God. 

All love is true, but not all truth … is love? 

If music be the food of love, get me a supersized big mac, chips, two apple pies and a large milkshake. 

Philosophy is like a normal personal organizer, but it’s smaller than a matchbox. 

I’m so smart, I read and understand Hegel 

The universe is God. I am God so that means I am the universe. 

My philosophy? I’m always right and you are wrong. 

There is no such thing as a heterosexual male, only men who haven’t met Oscar Wilde yet. 

The last person who ever crossed me is dead under my bed!!! 

I should have remembered that when one is going to lead an entirely new life, one requires regular and wholesome meals. 

It is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees. 

A virtuous abstinence from the joys of pederasty comes most easily to those who have no taste for it. 

Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. 

Genius learns from nature, its own nature. Talent learns from art. 

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. 

An actor is part illusionist, part artist, part ham. 

Judges, like the criminal classes, have their lighter moments 

It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is a proper judge of it 

Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out. 

The face of the enemy frightens me only when I see how much it resembles me 

If the poor only had profiles there would be no difficulty in solving the problem of poverty 

An optimist will tell you the glass is half-full; the pessimist, half-empty; and the engineer will tell you the glass is twice the size it needs to be. 

God’s eternal laws are kind-and break the heart of stone. 

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it. 

I do not approve of anything which tampers with natural ignorance 

I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering. 

Some temptations are so great it takes great courage to yield to them. 

What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise [in the future. But only if we set out to make this true and anticipate it so we look for the blessings until we find them]. 

One should never make one’s entrance with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one’s old age. 

Never buy anything simply because it is expensive. 

I am afraid he has one of those terribly weak natures that are susceptible to influence. 

Marriage is hardly a thing one can do now and then, except in America. 

Frank Harris has been received in all the great houses – once. 

A mutual misunderstanding. 

Women’s styles may change but their designs remain the same. 

Her capacity for family affection is extraordinary. When her third husband died, her hair turned quite gold from grief. 

Sphinxes without secrets. 

A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection. 

People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. 

What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise for which we are later, in the fullness of time and understanding, very grateful for! 

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language. 

I am a man of simple pleasures. The best suits me perfectly. 

Beauty …is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon. 

All art is at once surface and symbol. 

Yes, I am a thorough republican. No other form of government is so favorable to the growth of art. …because of the importance it places on the individual, their liberty, self-expression, creativity, and personal responsibility. 

Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. It seeks to show new perspectives and other choices. It is a way to help expand and liberate the consciousness; our experiences, understandings, imaginings, options and thereby our lives. 

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. …Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known. …Art is Individualism… 

Freedom, individualism and being yourself so long as you don’t hurt another’s physical person or property: The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself. 

The best art is about individualism, free self-expression and realising a unique, imaginative perspective- A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent. 

A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art. 

Loveless marriages are horrible. But there is one thing worse than an absolutely loveless marriage. A marriage in which there is love, but on one side only; faith, but on one side only; devotion, but on one side only, and in which of the two hearts one is sure to be broken. 

The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. 

I am very glad I have travelled. Travel improves the mind wonderfully, and does away with all one’s prejudices. 

The only thing I can’t resist is temptation. 

Now, nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be able to rob a man at all. What a man really has, is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance. 

The history of women is the history of the worst form of tyranny the world has ever known. The tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts. 

It is a very dangerous thing to know one’s friends. 

It is a much cleverer thing to talk nonsense than to listen to it. 

The youth of the present day are quite monstrous. They have absolutely no respect for dyed hair. 

What a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us. 

I often take exercise. Why only yesterday I had breakfast in bed. 

Some people always know the price, but not the value 

Travel ennobles the spirit and does away with our prejudices. 

All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction. 

An idea that isn’t risky is hardly worth calling an idea. 

I don’t write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For my own sake I must forgive you. 

Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation. 

but the bravest man among us is afraid of himself 

Irony is wasted on the stupid 

Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit. 

It can never be necessary to do what is not honourable. 

Well, I know, of course, how important it is not to keep a business engagement, if one wants to retain any sense of the beauty of life. 

The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People’s Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. 

Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. 

A burnt child loves the fire. 

I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world… And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom. 

I am happy in my prison of passion 

If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated. 

I hope you hair curls naturally, does it? Yes, darling, with a little help from others. 

I’ve now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest. 

When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself. 

I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question – simple curiosity. 

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. 

My dear Algy, you talk exactly as if you were a dentist. It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn’t a dentist. It produces false impression 

Immanuel isn’t a pun; he Kant be! 

It’s tragic how few people ever ‘possess their souls’ before they die. ‘Nothing is more rare in any man’, says Emerson, ‘than an act of his own.’ It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their life is a mimicry, their passions a quotation. 

Common sense is the enemy of Romance :P:P 

Beauty is a form of Genius-is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it. 

People say sometimes that Beauty is superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. 

I forget what killed it. I think it was her proposing to sacrifice the whole world for me. That is always a dreadful moment. It fills one with the terror of eternity. 

Well, I can’t help going to see Sibyl play, even if it is only for an act. I get hungry for her presence; and when I think of the wonderful soul that is hidden away in that little ivory body, I am filled with awe.” “You can dine with me to-night, Dorian, can’t you?” He shook his head. “To night she is Imogen,” he answered, “and tomorrow night she will be Juliet.” “When is she Sibyl Vane?” “Never.” “I congratulate you. 

I must remember that a good friend is a new world. 

When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy. 

Genius lasts longer than beauty 

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless. 

All criticism is a form of autobiography 

It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way. 

I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips 

Nature is always behind the age 

Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all you must not strip it of vitality. You must find it in life and re-create it in art. 

They’ve promised that dreams can come true – but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too. 

One is not always happy when one is good; but one is always good when one is happy. 

Any place that we love becomes our world. 

My desire to live is as intense as ever, and though my heart is broken, hearts are made to be broken: that is why God sends sorrow into the world. 

I see that any materialism in life coarsens the soul, and that the hunger of the body and the appetites of the flesh desecrate always, and often destroy. 

The weather is entrancing, but in my heart there is no sun. 

I drink to separate my body from my soul. 

The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated. 

There is one thing infinitely more pathetic than to have lost the woman one is in love with, and that is to have won her and found out how shallow she is! 

A man who moralizes is a hypocrite, and a woman who does so is invariably plain. 

Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is. 

The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist. 

I don’t play accurately-any one can play accurately-but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte. I keep science for Life. 

Tread Lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow. 

My writing has gone to bits – like my character. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain. 

Christ did not die to save people, but to teach people how to save each other. This is, I have no doubt, a grave heresy, but it is also a fact. 

I have pleasures, and passions, but the joy of life is gone. I am going under: the morgue yawns for me. I go and look at my zinc-bed there. After all, I had a wonderful life, which is, I fear, over. 

The unread is always better than the unreadable. 

I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts. 

Jack? . . . No, there is very little music in the name Jack, if any at all, indeed. It does not thrill. It produces absolutely no vibrations . . . I have known several Jacks, and they all, without exception, were more than usually plain. Besides, Jack is a notorious domesticity for John! And I pity any woman who is married to a man called John. She would probably never be allowed to know the entrancing pleasure of a single moment’s solitude. The only really safe name is Ernest. 

With an evening coat and a white tie, anybody, even a stockbroker, can gain a reputation for being civilized 

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. 

Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing. 

The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend on it for their daily bread and the highest form of literature, Poetry, brings no wealth to the singer. 

Don’t be afraid. There are exquisite things in store for you. This is merely the beginning. 

The only thing I cannot resist is temptation. 

Any map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at. 

Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. 

Only the unimaginative can fail to find a reason for drinking Champagne 

Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic. 

I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. 

He wants to enslave you.’ ‘I shudder at the thought of being free. 

The camera, you know, will never capture you. Photography, in my experience, has the miraculous power of transferring wine into water. 

To get into the best society, nowadays, one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people – that is all! 

The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married. 

we always misunderstood ourselves, and rarely understood others 

I’m too old to know everything 

Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. 

It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institutions of private property. 

But what is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means? Anybody can say charming things and try to please and to flatter, but a true friend always says unpleasant things, and does not mind giving pain. Indeed, if he is a really true friend he prefers it, for he knows that then he is doing good. 

I see the moon like a clipped piece of silver. Like gilded bees the stars cluster round her. 

The worst slave owners were those who were kind to their slaves 

A man who pays his bills on time is soon forgotten. 

I believe it is customary in good society to take some slight refreshment at five o’clock. 

Oh, I love London Society! It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what Society should be. 

We live, I regret to say, in an age of Big Data hype. 

Selfishness is not living your life as you wish to live it. Selfishness is wanting others to live their lives as you wish them to. 

The great poet is always a seer, seeing less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the mind. 

The good we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is what we become through it. 

Talent borrows, genius steals! 

The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. 

I am afraid that woman appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters, all the same. They love being dominated. 

Always be a little unexpected. 

Know thyself’ was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, ‘Be thyself’ shall be written. 

Would you be in any way offended if I said that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection? 

Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates. 

Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years. 

What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless. 

The artistic life is a long, lovely suicide. 

A flower blossoms for its own joy. 

A mask tells us more than a face. 

He made me see what Life is, and what Death signifies, and why Love is stronger than both. 

How long could you love a woman who didn’t love you, Cecil? A woman who didn’t love me? Oh, all my life! 

That is the mission of art – to make us pause and look at a thing a second time. 

Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination. 

Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. 

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again. 

To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity. 

Music makes one feel so romantic – at least it always gets on one’s nerves – which is the same thing nowadays. 

The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for. 

I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so. 

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. 

One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything. 

One has a right to judge a man by the effect he has over his friends. 

I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them. 

You can never be overdressed or overeducated. 

I can believe anything provided it is incredible. 

In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing. 

Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit. 

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. 

Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable 

Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast. 

America has never quite forgiven Europe for having been discovered somewhat earlier in history than itself. 

She…can talk brillantly upon any subject provided she knows nothing about it. 

Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do. 

Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground. 

Millionaire models are rare enough; but, by Jove, model millionaires are rarer still! 

Misfortunes one can endure-they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one’s own faults-ah!-there is the sting of life. 

Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes. 

To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture. 

Oh, brothers! I don’t care for brothers. My elder brother won’t die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else. 

If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life. 

Memory is the diary that chronicles things that never happened or couldn’t possibly have happened. 

Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. 

I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing. 

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. 

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody. 

The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death. 

A good friend will always stab you in the front. 

Literature always anticipates life. It doesn’t copy it but moulds it to it’s purpose. 

After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations. 

I played with an idea, and grew willful; tossed it into the air; transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox. 

Two men look out a window. One sees mud, the other sees the stars. 

My wish isn’t to mean everything to everyone but something to someone. 

I’m not nearly young enough to know everything 

When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers. My prayer was to be immortalized by unintelligent gibbons on a satirical Web site. 

Concordantly, while your first question may be the most pertinent, you may or may not realize it is also the most irrelevant. 

Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling. 

I love the French language… it’s a delightful language, especially to curse with. It’s like whopping your ass with silk. 

Industry is the root of all ugliness. 

What do you call a bad man? The sort of man who admires innocence. 

Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to you. Find expression for a joy, and you will intensify its ecstasy. 

I made your sorrow mine also, that you might have help in bearing it. 

Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see life as a whole, by which and by which alone we can understand others in their real and their ideal relation. Only what is fine, and finely conceived can feed love. But anything will feed hate. 

How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.” “Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.” “I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances. 

It is always painful fo part from people whom one has known for a very brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity. But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable. 

To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual. 

It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. 

Love does not traffic in a marketplace, nor use a huckster’s scales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less. You were my enemy: such an enemy as no man ever had. I had given you all my life, and to gratify the lowest and most contemptible of all human passions, hatred and vanity and greed, you had thrown it away. In less than three years you had entirely ruined me in every point of view. For my own sake there was nothing for me to do but to love you. 

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful 

Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities. 

The Number our envious Persons, confirmation our capability. 

With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone. 

Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. 

We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible. 

A beautiful woman risking everything for a mad passion. A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous, treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man. Yes, it was an interesting background. It posed the lad, made him more perfect as it were. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. 

Pleasures may turn a heart to stone, riches may make it callous, but sorrows cannot break it. Hearts live by being wounded. 

The tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self denial. 

He is some brainless, beautiful creature, who should always be here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in the summer when we want something to chill our intelligence. 

It’s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world 

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies. 

For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time. That is not such a tragic thing as possibly it sounds to you. To those who are in prison tears are a part of every day’s experience. A day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one’s heart is hard, not a day on which one’s heart is happy. 

For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce. 

I love to talk about nothing. It’s the only thing I know anything about. 

Ah! The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women…merely adored. 

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself. 

The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life. 

The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought and sold and bartered away. 

She knew nothing but she had everything he had lost. 

But what world says that [I’m wicked]? It can only be the next world. This world and I are on excellent terms. 

If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. 

We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow. 

The weather still continues charming. 

I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it. 

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy. 

Conscience makes egotists of us all. 

One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing. 

I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones. 

I love scrapes. They are the only things that are never serious.” “Oh, that’s nonsense, Algy. You never talk anything but nonsense.” “Nobody ever does. 

After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world. 

I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose. 

Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself. 

I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood. Don’t degrade me into the position of giving you useful information. Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. 

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it 

To look wise is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier. 

Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect. 

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all. 

You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one. 

I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won’t argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue. 

It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man-that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value. 

There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act and circumstand, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous, and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own. 

History is a lie commonly agreed upon. 

A woman’s life revolves in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man’s life progresses. 

Fashion rests upon folly. Art rests upon law. Fashion is ephemeral. Art is eternal. Indeed what is a fashion really? A fashion is merely a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months! It is quite clear that were it beautiful and rational we would not alter anything that combined those two rare qualities. And wherever dress has been so, it has remained unchanged in law and principle for many hundred years. 

I am Irish by race but the English have condemned me to talk the language of Shakespeare. 

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art. 

Just as the orator marks his good things by a dramatic pause, or by raising and lowering his voice, or by gesture, so the writer marks his epigrams with italics, setting the little gem, so to speak, like a jeweler. 

The only link between Literature and the Drama left to us in England at the present moment is the bill of the play. 

There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as in America. It was not until I had seen the water-works at Chicago that I realised the wonders of machinery; the rise and fall of the steel rods, the symmetrical motion of the great wheels is the most beautiful rhythmic thing I have ever seen. 

A live unexamined isn’t worth living. I will add, “A life unlived isn’t worth examining. 

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered. 

Life is too short to be in a hurry. 

The reason we are so pleased to find other people’s secrets is that it distracts public attention from our own. 

Children start out loving their parents, but as they grow older and discover their parents are human, they become judgmental. And sometimes, when they mature, they forgive their parents, especially when they discover they are also human. 

Art should never be popular. 

Nowadays, saying what you really think can be a serious error since one risks being misunderstood. 

If you want to be witty, say what you think at all times 

At six o’clock we cleaned our cells, At seven all was still, But the sough and swing of a mighty wing The prison seemed to fill, For the Lord of Death with icy breath Had entered in to kill. 

Don’t run down dyed hair and painted faces. There is an extraordinary charm in them, sometimes. 

If you cannot prove a man wrong, don’t panic. You can always call him names. 

The best way to appreciate your job is to, is here to stay. 

That very concentration of vision and intensity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic temperament is in itself a mode of limitation. To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of much importance. 

Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishment on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realize what it has done. When the man’s punishment is over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins. 

Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. 

Every single work of art is the fulfillment of a prophecy; for every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image. 

A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his punishment. Those who want a mask have to wear it. 

All women are rebels. 

I have put my talent into writing, my genius I have saved for living. 

California is an Italy without its art. 

Cleverness becomes a public nuisance. 

The only way to get rid of tempation is to yeild to it. 

The only sin is stupidity. 

Just to let you know that the buffet car will be closing for stocktaking in five minutes. The next station stop is Chesterfield. 

It is a very dangerous thing to know one’s friends. 

When I ask for a water cress sandwich, I do not mean a loaf with a field in the middle of it. 

Palermo was lovely. The most beautifully situated town in the world – it dreams away its life in the Conca d’Oro, the exquisite valley that lies between two seas. The lemon groves and the orange gardens were entirely perfect. 

Anybody can sympathise with all the sufferings of the pal, nevertheless it involves an extremely great mother nature to sympathise by using a friend’s achievement. 

True contentment is not having everything, but in being satisfied with everything you have. 

There is no man who is not, at each moment, what he has been and what he will be. 

I gave my genius to my life, but my talent to my art. 

Be yourself, because others are already taken. 

The Lord’s Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, there are 1.322 words in the Declaration of Independence, but government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26.911 words. The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. 

Progress is the realization of utopia. 

Imitation is the homage mediocrity pays to greatness. 

The only way to atone for being occasionally overdressed is to be massively overeducated. 

Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterize modern thought, but Hamlet invented it 

Everyone should keep someone else’s diary. 

I have never killed anyone, but I have often read about some guy getting his ass taken out with great pleasure 

The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous. 

A grand passion is the privelege of people who have nothing to do. 

A woman who cannot make her mistakes charming, is only a female. 

And certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not? And I don’t like that. It makes men so very attractive. 

The chin a little higher, dear. Style largely depends on the way the chin is worn. They are worn very high, just at present. 

One’s dreams must be big enough so as not to lose sight of them. 

No publisher should ever express an opinion of the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide. 

Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. 

Marco Polo had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-colored pearls in the mouths of the dead. A sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that the diver brought to King Perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned for seven moons over its loss. 

God, bless me with luxury. Necessities I can do without. 

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well. If it is worth having, it is worth waiting for. If it is worth attaining, it is worth fighting for. If it is worth experiencing, it is worth putting aside time for. 

And if it feels good… Feel it! 

It is perfectly possible to get what you think you want and be miserable. It’s possible too, to never get it but deeply enjoy the process of trying. In this world, there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. 

Learn to differentiate between ignorance and stupidity. 

The best people to work for are me, myself and I. 

There is no Mystery so great as Misery. 

History is only gossip. 

To live in this world is a rare thing; most people just exist. 

Nothing worth learning can ever be taught 

A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public to him are non-existent. 

No one wants to see a play called ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’. It’s going to be called ‘Cocks in Frocks II’ or I will find another publisher 

When I was young, I was no one. Now, I’m worldwilde. 

To be popular I must be mediocre. 

Whenever I’m in doubt, I ask myself, ‘What would Jesus do?’ And then I realize, Jesus got crucified, so maybe his decision-making isn’t all that great. 

A true gentleman is one who is never intentionally rude. 

A publisher is simply a useful middle-man. 

Oh, no doubt the cod is a splendid swimmer – admirable for swimming purposes but not for eating. 

Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement. Nothing spoils romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman. When one is in love one always begins by deceiving oneself, and one always ends by deceiving others. This is what the world calls a romance. 

As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognise the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection. 

I was saying, continued the Rocket, I was saying – What was I saying? You were talking about yourself, replied the Roman Candle.Of course; I knew I was discussing some interesting subject when I was so rudely interrupted. 

And beauty is a form of genius – is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it. 

The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. And the body is born young and grows old. That is life’s tragedy. 

A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress. But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner. Affectation, in such matters, consists in dressing according to the views of one’s neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid. 

I didn’t have a life until I went up onstage. 

Psychology is in its infancy, as a science. I hope in the interests of Art, it will always remain so. 

When I see a spade, I call it a spade. I’m glad to say I have never seen a spade. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use it. It’s the only thing he’s fit for. 

George Moore leads his readers to the latrine and locks them in. 

When I had to fill in my immigration papers, I gave my age as 19, and my profession as genius; I added that I had nothing to declare except my talent. 

Men as a rule love with their eyes, woman with their ears. 

If it is not nailed to the floor, it’s mine. If I can pry it loose, it is not nailed down. 

Life is like a box of terrible analogies… 

There is one thing worse than an absolutely loveless marriage: a marriage in which there is love, but on one side only. 

Poets know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions. 

There’s no sin but stupidity. 

What the hell is an oboe? 

An opinion is not necesarily correct just because you’re willing to die for it. 

People may fail many times, but they become failures only when they begin to blame someone else. Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much. 

Don’t be discouraged if your children reject your advice. Years later they will offer it to their own offspring. 

All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and it degrades those over whom it is exercised. 

Give children beauty, not the record of bloody slaughters and barbarous brawls, as they call history, or of the latitude and longitude of places nobody cares to visit, as they call geography. 

The ages live in history through their anachronisms. 

The only thing that the artist cannot see is the obvious. The only thing that the public can see is the obvious… 

Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas. 

Don’t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you. 

Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the body but the body. 

What is abnormal in Life stands in normal relations to Art. It is the only thing in Life that stands in normal relations to Art. 

The criminal classes are so close to us that even the policemen can see them… 

I like my food dry. Not sick, not even dying, dead. 

After a good quality dinner one will be able to forgive anybody, still one’s own relations. 

Hard work is amply the refuge of those who have nothing to do. 

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. 

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don’t listen, and if one plays bad music people don’t talk. 

All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. 

And all, but Lust, is turned to dust In Humanity’s machine. 

He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise. 

Tread Lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow. 

Lo! with a little rod I did but touch the honey of romance – And must I lose a soul’s inheritance? 

Over the piano was printed a notice: Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best. 

And down the long and silent street, The dawn, with silver-sandalled feet, Crept like a frightened girl. 

And, after all, what is a fashion? From the artistic point of view, it is usually a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. 

Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror. 

All art is immoral. 

On George Bernard Shaw An excellent man: he has no enemies, and none of his friends like him. 

I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram. 

Tell me, when you are alone with him Sphinx, does he take off his face and reveal his mask? 

One can survive everything nowadays except death. 

I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips. 

She said that she would dance with me if I brought her red roses, cried the young Student; but in all my garden there is no red rose. 

Why, what a wonderful piece of luck! Here is a red rose! I have never seen any rose like it in all my life. It is so beautiful that I am sure it has a long Latin name. 

Hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do. 

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. 

Art persists, it timelessly continues. 

If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture…In a house, we all feel of the proper proportions. Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure. 

The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary montony, her absolutely unfinished condition. 

Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose. 

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it. 

There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other-by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought. 

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography. 

Truth, in the matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived. 

Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read. 

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection; through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence. 

It is to do nothing that the elect exist. Action is limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams. 

Ah! Don’t say you agree with me. When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong. 

My own business always bores me to death. I prefer other people’s. 

Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. 

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. 

A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. 

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. 

Mrs. Allonby: They say, Lady Hunstanton, that when good Americans die they go to Paris. Lady Hunstanton: Indeed? And when bad Americans die, where do they go to? Lord Illingworth: Oh, they go to America. 

The English country gentleman galloping after a fox – the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable. 

Kelvil: May I ask, Lord Illingworth, if you regard the House of Lords as a better institution than the House of Commons? Lord Illingworth: A much better institution of course. We in the House of Lords are never in touch with public opinion. That makes us a civilised body. 

Lord Illingworth: The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. Mrs. Allonby: It ends with Revelations. 

Lady Hunstanton: But do you believe all that is written in the newspapers? Lord Illingworth: I do. Nowadays it is only the unreadable that occurs. 

Gerald: I suppose society is wonderfully delightful? Lord Illingworth: To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it simply a tragedy. 

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. 

The English are always degrading truths into facts. When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value. 

Even the disciple has his uses. He stands behind one’s throne, and at the moment of one’s triumph whispers in one’s ear that, after all, one is immortal. 

The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance. The only thing that can console one for being rich is economy. 

Patriotism is the vice of nations. 

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance. 

The only way to atone for being occasionally a little over-dressed is by being always absolutely over-educated. 

Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? 

The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. 

My dear fellow, the truth isn’t quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl. 

I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. 

The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty and to someone else if she is plain. 

Ah! That must be Aunt Augusta. Only relatives, or creditors, ever ring in that Wagnerian manner. 

To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. 

Jack: That, my dear Algy, is the whole truth pure and simple. Algernon: The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility! 

In married life, three is company, and two is none. 

It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read. 

Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven’t got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die. 

Mothers, of course, are all right. They pay a chap’s bills and don’t bother him. But fathers bother a chap and never pay his bills. 

The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man. And certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not? 

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy. 

The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity. But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable. 

Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One must eat muffins quite calmly, it is the only way to eat them. 

To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage, which I think is never advisable. 

I’ve now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest. 

Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it, in this world. 

Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is. 

I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know anything about. 

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb a the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf. 

The only possible society is oneself. 

Lord Caversham: No woman, plain or pretty, has any common sense at all, sir. Common sense is the privilege of our sex. Lord Goring: Quite so. And we men are so self-sacrificing that we never use it, do we, father? 

Do you really think, Arthur, that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. 

Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. 

Now don’t stir. I’ll be back in five minutes. And don’t fall into any temptations while I am away. 

Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. 

Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them. 

As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg. 

With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. 

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. 

Man reaches his perfection, not through what he has, not even through what he does, but entirely through what he is. 

The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever. 

High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. 

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. 

Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. 

People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous. 

There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannises over the body. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People. 

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. 

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky. 

When a voice behind me whispered low, That fellow’s got to swing. 

Yet each man kills the thing he loves By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword! 

It is sweet to dance to violins When Love and Life are fair: To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes Is delicate and rare: But it is not sweet with nimble feet To dance upon the air! 

Something was dead in each of us, And what was dead was Hope. 

And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats, None knew so well as I: For he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die. 

And alien tears will fill for him Pity’s long-broken urn, For his mourners will be outcast men, And outcasts always mourn. 

I know not whether Laws be right, Or whether Laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol Is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, A year whose days are long. 

The vilest deeds like poison weeds Bloom well in prison air; It is only what is good in man That wastes and withers there; Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate And the Warder is Despair. 

How else but through a broken heart May Lord Christ enter in? 

A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it. 

We are specially designed to appeal to the sense of humour. 

We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken. 

When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul? 

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground. 

For a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. 

All trials are trials of one’s life, just as all sentences are sentences of death. 

Genius is born – not paid. 

The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. 

Wisdom comes with winters. 

The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived. 

I don’t play accurately-any one can play accurately- but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte. I keep science for Life. 

Crying is the refuge of plain women, but the ruin of pretty ones. 

Vile deeds like poison weeds bloom well in prison air, it is only what is good in man, that wastes and withers there. 

But what is the difference between literature and journalism?… Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all. 

One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason. 

Do not speak ill of society, Algie. Only people who can’t get in do that. 

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them. 

I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible. 

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes. 

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself. 

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution. 

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made. 

Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend’s success. 

I suppose that I shall have to die beyond my means. 

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies. 

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving oneself, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance. 

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

One should always play fair when one has the winning cards. 

The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention. 

Action is the last resource of those who know not how to dream. 

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. 

God and other artists are always a little obscure. 

A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection. 

Science is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths. Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing. To morals belong the lower and less intellectual spheres. 

The modern sympathy with invalids is morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to encourage in others. 

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. 

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory. 

The recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain, not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing is to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. 

Religion is a fashionable substitute for Belief. 

Duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does one’s self. 

Misfortunes one can endure – they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one’s own faults – ah! there is the sting of life. 

A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want? 

How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver. 

It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. 

I never go without my dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that. 

The things of nature do not really belong to us; we should leave them to our children as we have received them. 

That he is indeed one of the very greatest masters of painting is my opinion. And I may add that in this opinion Mr. Whistler himself entirely concurs. 

Pathology is rapidly becoming the basis of sensational literature, and in art, as in politics, there is a great future for monsters. 

Anybody can write a three-volumed novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature. 

More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not at all. That is a gross popular error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is of course obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it. 

The criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind. It treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation. It does not confine itself… to discovering the real intention of the artist and accepting that as final. 

All art is immoral…. For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life, and of that practical organization of life that we call society. 

The proper school to learn art in is not Life but Art. 

The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in aesthetic criticism attitude is everything. For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true. 

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

The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer. 

How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June…. If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that-for that-I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that! 

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. 

When one is in love one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. 

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. 

Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one’s age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality. 

Ernest Harrowden, one of those middle-aged mediocrities so common in London clubs who have no enemies, but are thoroughly disliked by their friends. 

Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. I don’t blame them in the smallest degree. I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations. 

The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is. 

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. 

We are dominated by Journalism. In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever. 

The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. 

We [women] have a much better time than they [men] have. There are far more things forbidden to us than are forbidden to them. 

It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one’s back that are absolutely and entirely true. 

You can’t make people good by Act of Parliament. 

One knows so well the popular idea of health. The English country gentleman galloping after a fox-the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable. 

Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building. 

Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things. What we like is to be a man’s last romance. 

Study the Peerage…. It is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done. 

Moderation is a fatal thing, Lady Hunstanton. Nothing succeeds like excess. 

In all things connected with money I have had a luck so extraordinary that sometimes it has made me almost afraid. I remember having read somewhere, in some strange book, that when the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers. 

The ‘Love that dare not speak its name’ in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michael Angelo and Shakespeare. 

On account of it [‘the Love that dare not speak its name’] I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope, and glamour of life before him. 

And I? May I say nothing, my Lord? 

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age…. The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring: I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colors of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder. 

I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram. 

Just as there are false dawns before the dawn itself, and winter-days so full of sudden sunlight that they will cheat the wise crocus into squandering its gold before its time, and make some foolish bird call to its mate to build on barren boughs, so there were Christians before Christ…. The unfortunate thing is that there have been none since. 

To recognize that the soul of a man is unknowable is the ultimate achievement of Wisdom. The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in a balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul? 

Every American bride is taken there [Niagara Falls], and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life. 

This is one of the compliments that mediocrity pays to those who are not mediocre. 

Poets, you know, are always ahead of science; all the great discoveries of science have been stated before in poetry. 

California is an Italy without its art. There are subjects for the artist, but it is universally true that the only scenery which inspires utterance is that which man feels himself the master of. The mountains of California are so gigantic that they are not favorable to art or poetry. There are good poets in England but none in Switzerland. There the mountains are too high. Art cannot add to nature. 

It is indeed a burning shame that there should be one law for men and another law for women…. I think that there should be no law for anybody. 

I have put my genius into my life; I have put only my talent into my works. 

I have been correcting the proofs of my poems. In the morning, after hard work, I took a comma out of one sentence… In the afternoon, I put it back again. 

[When asked why he was staring at a pair of vases on his mantelpiece:] Oh, would that I could live up to my blue china! 

[At the New York Custom House in 1882:] I have nothing to declare except my genius. 

Work is the curse of the drinking classes of this country. 

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell [in Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop] without laughing. 

We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks. 

I never put off till to-morrow what I can possibly do… the day after. 

It is sad. One half of the world does not believe in God, and the other half does not believe in me. 

Don’t tell me that you have exhausted life. When a man says that one knows that Life has exhausted him. 

Each time one loves is the only time that one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. 

[When asked to name the hundred best books of all time:] I fear that would be impossible, because I have only written five. 

I am dying, as I have lived, beyond my means. 

Mr. Whistler always spelt art, and we believe still spells it, with a capital ‘I. 

Decidedly one of us will have to go. 

Let me say to you now that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual. 

Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change. 

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. 

If art [is] to have a special train, the critic must keep some seats reserved on it. 

The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art. 

Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. 

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. 

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered. 

They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them. 

Ah, now-a-days we are all of us so hard up, that the only pleasant things to pay are compliments. They’re the only things we can pay. 

Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of London, or seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each other in the open square: but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion. 

When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. 

Each little thing that we do passes into the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new civilisation, more marvelous and more splendid than any that has gone before. 

With an evening coat and a white tie, anybody, even a stockbroker, can gain a reputation for being civilized. 

Children have a natural antipathy to books – handicraft should be the basis of education. Boys and girls should be taught to use their hands to make something, and they would be less apt to destroy and be mischievous. 

If you meet at dinner a man who has spent his life in educating himself…you rise from table richer, and conscious that a high ideal has for a moment touched and sanctifed your days. But oh! to sit next a man who spent his life in trying to educate others! What a dreadful experience that is! How appalling is that ignorance which is the inevitable result of the fatal habit of imparting opinions! 

Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to overeducate ourselves. 

The secret of life is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming. 

The great events of one’s life often leave one unmoved: they pass out of consciousness, and, when one thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion. But the little things, the things of no moment, remain with us. 

To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s life. It is no less than a denial of the soul. 

None of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves. 

The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion – these are the two things that govern us. 

I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world. Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance. 

Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot. 

What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities. 

Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibers, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. 

When one is in love one begins by deceiving one’s self. And one ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance. 

Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building. 

[Married men] are horribly tedious when they are good husbands, and abominably conceited when they are not. 

If a woman wants to hold a man, she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him. We make gods of men, and they leave us. Others make brutes of them and they fawn and are faithful. 

A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain. 

Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. 

To become the spectator of one’s own life is to escape the suffering of life. 

Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is one’s self. 

Every prison that men build Is built with bricks of shame, And bound with bars lest Christ should see How men their brothers maim. 

Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account. 

Perhaps one never seems so much at one’s ease as when one has to play a part. 

Nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humour in the woman. 

Self-denial is simply a method by which man arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage. 

A sentimentalist is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing. 

To get into the best society nowadays, one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people. 

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing it is always from the noblest motive. 

Hearts live by being wounded. 

Suffering is one very long moment. We can not divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods and chronicle their return. 

Talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact. 

It is so easy for people to have sympathy with suffering. It is so difficult for them to have sympathy with thought. 

Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. 

For what is Truth? In matters of religion, it is simply the opinion that has survived. In matters of science, it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art, it is one’s last mood. 

Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. 

All art is quite useless. So is a flower. 

Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. 

Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. 

Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching – that is really what our enthusiasm for education has come to. 

Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life. Mothers are different. Mothers are darlings. 

Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it. 

Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed. 

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional. 

The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything. 

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

Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the two sexes. 

He hasn’t an enemy in the world, and none of his friend like him. 

Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things. There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. The thin beaten-out leaf of tremulous gold that chronicles the direction of forces the eye cannot see is in comparison coarse. It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it, and even then must bleed again, though not in pain. 

But what of life whose bitter hungry sea Flows at our heels, and gloom of sunless night Covers the days which never more return? Ambition, love and all the thoughts that burn We lose too soon, and only find delight In withered husks of some dead memory. 

Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. … For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain. 

Is it thy will that I should wax and wane, Barter my cloth of gold for hodden grey, And at thy pleasure weave that web of pain Whose brightest threads are each a wasted day? 

The sin was mine; I did not understand. So now is music prisoned in her cave, Save where some ebbing desultory wave Frets with its restless whirls this meagre strand… 

Yes: I am a dreamer. For 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. 

You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit. 

Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power. 

I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability. 

I can resist anything except temptation. 

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

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his. 

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

I have nothing to declare except my genius. 

No good deed goes unpunished. 

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance. 

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike. 

Yet each man kills the thing he loves By each let this be heard Some do it with a bitter look Some with a flattering word The coward does it with a kiss The brave man with a sword 

The world is a stage and the play is badly cast. 

Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed. 

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. 

What of Art? -It is a malady. -Love? -An Illusion. -Religion? -The fashionable substitute for Belief. -You are a sceptic. -Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith. -What are you? -To define is to limit. 

How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being 

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing. 

The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last. 

I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself. 

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is by far the best ending for one. 

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

Yes, death. Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace. You can help me. You can open for me the portals of death’s house, for love is always with you, and love is stronger than death is. 

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. (Mr. Dumby, Act III) 

I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do – the day after. 

I do’ say we all ought to misbehave. But we ought to look as if we could 

One should always be in love. That’s the reason one should never marry. 

Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed. 

Only the shallow know themselves 

A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her. 

Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to oneself. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion – these are the two things that govern us. 

What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? 

I won’t tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world’s voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. You have that moment now. Choose! 

Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword! Some kill their love when they are young, And some when they are old; Some strangle with the hands of Lust, Some with the hands of Gold: The kindest use a knife, because The dead so soon grow cold. Some love too little, some too long, Some sell, and others buy; Some do the deed with many tears, And some without a sigh: For each man kills the thing he loves, Yet each man does not die. 

The one charm about the past is that it is the past. 

I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be somebody else. 

Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion-these are the two things that govern us. And yet, I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream-I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal-to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. 

Illusion is the first of all pleasures 

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible…. 

How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I ca’ make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.’ ‘Well, I ca’ eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.’ ‘I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances. 

When the Gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers. 

Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you. 

Never regret thy fall, O Icarus of the fearless flight For the greatest tragedy of them all Is never to feel the burning light. 

I have no objection to anyone’s sex life as long as they do’ practice it in the street and frighten the horses. 

It takes great courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it. And even more courage to see it in the one you love 

As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her daughter, she is perfectly satisfied 

nothing that is worth knowing can be taught 

Memory is the diary we all carry about with us. 

It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them. 

I’ll bet you anything you like that half an hour after they have met, they will be calling each other sister. Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first. 

Each man kills the thing he loves. 

One’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead. 

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious 

My life-my whole life- take it, and do with it what you will. I love you-love you as I have never loved any living thing. From the moment I met you I loved you, loved you blindly, adoringly,madly! You didn’t know it then-you know it now. 

Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects. 

When good Americans die, they go to Paris. 

When you really want love you will find it waiting for you. 

Good heavens, I suppose a man may eat his own muffins in his own garden.’ ‘But you have just said it was perfectly heartless to eat muffins!’ ‘I said it was perfectly heartless of YOU under the circumstances. That is a very different thing.’ ‘That may be, but the muffins are the same! 

I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. 

Arguments are to be avoided, they are always vulgar and often convincing. 

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else. 

The error all women commit. Why ca’ you women love us, faults and all? Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals? We have all feet of clay, women as well as men; but when we men love women, we love them knowing their weaknesses, their follies, their imperfections, love them all the more, it may be, for that reason. It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us – else what use is love at all? All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon. A man’s love is like that. It is wider, larger, more human than a woman’s. Women think that they are making ideals of men. What they are making of us are false idols merely. You made your false idol of me, and I had not the courage to come down, show you my wounds, tell you my weaknesses. I was afraid that I might lose your love, as I have lost it now. 

It is better to be beautiful then to be good, but it is better to be good then to be ugly. 

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us. 

Indeed, no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating. 

Oscar Wilde was suing the Marquis of Queensbury in 1895 for libel accusing Wilde of homosexuality Counsel: Have you ever adored a young man madly? Wilde: I have never given adoration to anyone except myself. 

You seem to forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. 

Cecil Graham: What is a cynic? Lord Darlington: A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing. Cecil Graham: And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and does’ know the market price of any single thing. 

My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals. 

I’m a man of simple tastes. I’m always satisfied with the best. 

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure 

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognizes infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it. It is not selfish to think for oneself. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of one’s neighbor that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will probably think differently. If he cannot think, it is monstrous to require thought of any kind from him. A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses. 

Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything. Yes, murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; and when they grow older they know it. 

And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand, The hand that held the steel: For only blood can wipe out blood, And only tears can heal 

There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain. 

Well I won’t argue about the matter. You always want to argue about things. That is exactly what things were originally made for. 

And all the woe that moved him so That he gave that bitter cry the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats None knew so well as I: For he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die. 

The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself. 

Every one is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling. 

The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring. 

You are what you read 

The only difference between saints and sinners is that every saint has a past while every sinner has a future. 

Imagination is a quality that was given to man compensate him from whats not. The sense of humor was given to console him from what is. 

This ghastly state of things is what you call Bunburying, I suppose? Algernon. Yes, and a perfectly wonderful Bunbury it is. The most wonderful Bunbury I have ever had in my life. Jack. Well, you’ve no right whatsoever to Bunbury here. Algernon. That is absurd. One has a right to Bunbury anywhere one chooses. Every serious Bunburyist knows that. 

When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I daresay, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one’s life. 

Why can’t these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women. It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it. 

I hope, Cecily, I shall not offend you if I state quite frankly and openly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection. 

I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can’t go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left. ALGERNON: We have. JACK: I should extremely like to meet them. What do they talk about? ALGERNON: The fools? Oh! about the clever people of course. JACK: What fools. 

I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can’t go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left. ALGERNON: We have. JACK: I should extremely like to meet them. What do they talk about? ALGERNON: The fools? Oh! about the clever people of course. JACK: What fools. 

I am the only person I would like to know thoroughly 

Be happy, cried the Nightingale, be happy; you shall have your red rose. I will build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with my own heart’s-blood. All that I ask of you in return is that you will be a true lover, for Love is wiser than Philosophy, though she is wise, and mightier than Power, though he is mighty. Flame-coloured are his wings, and coloured like flame is his body. His lips are sweet as honey, and his breath is like frankincense. 

If one plays good music, people don’t listen, and if one plays bad music people don’t talk. 

I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about it’s use. It is hitting below the intellect. 

Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. 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. 

It’s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world 

You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know. 

Do you smoke? Well, yes, I must admit I smoke. I’m glad to hear of it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind. 

Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.’ ‘I hate them for it,’ cried Hallward. ‘An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray. 

When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss Money 

The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be violent in turn. That would be to fall to the same low level. After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free. His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at peace. And, above all things, they are not to interfere with other people or judge them in any way. Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against society, and yet realize through that sin his true perfection. 

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in his choice of enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me. Is that very vain of me? I think that it is rather vain. 

Now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer’s day. 

After the first glass of absinthe you see things as you wish they were. After the second you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world. I mean disassociated. Take a top hat. You think you see it as it really is. But you do’ because you associate it with other things and ideas.If you had never heard of one before, and suddenly saw it alone, you’d be frightened, or you’d laugh. That is the effect absinthe has, and that is why it drives men mad. Three nights I sat up all night drinking absinthe, and thinking that I was singularly clear-headed and sane. The waiter came in and began watering the sawdust.The most wonderful flowers, tulips, lilies and roses, sprang up, and made a garden in the cafe. ‘Do’ you see them?’ I said to him. ‘Mais non, monsieur, il n’y a rien. 

My dear boy, the people who only love once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect-simply a confession of failures. 

Everything is going to be fine in the end. If it’s not fine it’s not the end. 

But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms. 

As for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible. 

Reported as Oscar Wilde’s last words on his death bed… This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has to go. 

You told me you had destroyed it.’ ‘I was wrong. It has destroyed me. 

Life cheats us with shadows. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us with bitterness and disappointment in its train. 

I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar and often convincing. 

I love scrapes. They are the only things that are never serious.’ ‘Oh, that’s nonsense, Algy. You never talk anything but nonsense.’ ‘Nobody ever does. 

When good Americans die, they go to Paris’ ‘Where do bad Americans go?’ ‘They stay in America 

True friends stab you in the front 

You and I will always be friends.’ ‘Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that. 

Bunbury? Oh, he was quite exploded. Exploded! Was he the victim of a revolutionary outrage? I was not aware that Mr. Bunbury was interested in social legislation. If so, he is well punished for his morbidity. My dear Aunt Augusta, I mean he was found out! The doctors found out that Bunbury could not , that is what I mean-so Bunbury died. He seems to have had great confidence in the opinion of his physicians. 

You, who know all the secrets of life, tell me how to charm Sibyl Vane to love me! I want to make Romeo jealous, I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain. 

The aim of life is self-development. To realise one’s nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. 

I hope you hair curls naturally, does it? Yes, darling, with a little help from others. 

I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You ca’ go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left. 

So with curious eyes and sick surmise We watched him day by day, And wondered if each one of us Would end the self-same way, For none can tell to what red Hell His sightless soul may stray. 

Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear. Just as vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people. And falsehoods the truths of other people. Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself. To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance. 

How long could you love a woman who didn’t love you, Cecil? A woman who didn’t love me? Oh, all my life! 

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. 

Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. 

Lady Bracknell. Good afternoon, dear Algernon, I hope you are behaving very well. Algernon. I’m feeling very well, Aunt Augusta. Lady Bracknell. That’s not quite the same thing. In fact the two things rarely go together. 

A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. 

LADY BRACKNELL To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage, which I think is never advisable. 

He covered page after page with wild words of sorrow and wilder words of pain. There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution. 

Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe, and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings sublte memories with it, a line from a piece of music that you had ceased to play-I tell you Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend. 

It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. I discern great sanity in the Greek attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on the grass were really mauve or not. But they saw that the sea was for the swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the runner. They loved the trees for the shadow that they cast, and the forest for its silence at noon. 

I know he likes me. Of course I flatter him dreadfully. I find a strange pleasure in saying things to him that I know I shall be sorry for having said…Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to someone who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer’s day. 

Cecily. This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade. Gwendolen. [Satirically.] I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different. 

I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit. 

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. 

I do’ regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience. 

Questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes are. 

No, you don’t feel it now. Some day, when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with itshideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly.Now, wherever you go, you charm the world. Will it always be so? . . . You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr. Gray. Don’t frown. You have. And beauty is a form of genius- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.You smile? Ah! when you have lost it you won’t smile. . . . People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial.That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders.It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. . . . Yes, Mr. Gray, the gods have been good to you.But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully.When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats.Every month as it wanes brings you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed. You will suffer horribly…. Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days,listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure,or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals,of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing. . . . A new Hedonism- that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol.With your personality there is nothing you could not do.The world belongs to you for a season. . . . The moment I met you I saw that you were quite unconscious of what you really are, of what you really might be. There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself.I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted. For there is such a little time that your youth will last-such a little time.The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again.The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now.In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth! 

From the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul brain and power. 

Oh, I do’ care about Jack. I do’ care for anybody in the whole world but you. I love you, Cecily. You will marry me, wo’ you? You silly boy! Of course. Why, we have been engaged for the last three months. For the last three months? 

Good heavens! how marriage ruins a man! It’s as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive. 

To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul. 

It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. 

There is no good talking to him,’ said a Dragon-fly, who was sitting on the top of a large brown bulrush; ‘no good at all, for he has gone away.’ ‘Well, that is his loss, not mine,’ answered the Rocket. ‘I am not going to stop talking to him merely because he pays no attention. I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself, and I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.’ ‘Then you should definitely lecture on Philosophy,’ said the Dragon-fly. 

LORD ILLINGWORTH: The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. MRS ALLONBY: And the body is born young and grows old. That is life’s tragedy. 

Jack: ‘Gwendolen, wait here for me.’ Gwendolen: ‘If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life. 

In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you 

One of the great secrets of life. Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense and discover too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes. 

Jack: Actually, I was found. Lady Bracknell: Found? Jack: Uh, yes, I was in… a handbag. Lady Bracknell: A handbag? Jack: Yes, it was… [makes gestures] Jack: an ordinary handbag. 

I want to make Romeo jealous! I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain. 

I have always been of opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do. 

The Love that dare not speak its name’ in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the ‘Love that dare not speak its name,’ and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it. 

What a fuss people make about fidelity!’ exclaimed Lord Henry. ‘Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say. 

It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. (Algernon in The Importance of Being Ernest) 

I wish you would tell me your secret. To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable. 

tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play- I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend. 

I really don’t see what is so romantic about proposing. One may be accepted – one usually is, I believe – and then the excitement is ended. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. 

Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities 

Friendship…is not something you learn in school,but if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship you really haven’t learned anything. 

Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at. My gods dwell in temples made with hands; and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made perfect and complete: too complete, it may be, for like many or all of those who have placed their heaven in this earth, I have found in it not merely the beauty of heaven, but the horror of hell also. 

It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place 

She has form,’ he said to himself, as he walked away through the grove – ‘that cannot be denied to her; but has she got feeling? I am afraid not. In fact, she is like most artists; she is all style, without any sincerity. She would not sacrifice herself for others. She thinks merely of music, and everybody knows that arts are selfish. Still, it must be admitted that she has some beautiful notes in her voice. What a pity it is that they do not mean anything, or do any practical good. 

LORD ILLINGWORTH What do you think she’d do if I kissed her? MRS ALLONBY Either marry you, or strike you across the face with her glove. What would you do if she struck you across the face with her glove? LORD ILLINGWORTH Fall in love with her, probably. 

I don’t know how to talk. Oh! talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact. 

All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and individualism that is to kill it. When it is used with a certain amount of kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralising. People, in that case, are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is being put on them, and so go through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that they are probably thinking other people’s thoughts, living by other people’s standards, wearing practically what one may call other people’s second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment. 

You are a sceptic.’ ‘Never! Scepticism is the beginning of faith.’ ‘What are you?’ ‘To define is to limit. 

My dear Arthur, I never talk scandal. I only talk gossip. What is the difference between scandal and gossip? Oh! Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. 

Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but the highest form of intelligence. 

The people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect – simply a confession of failure. 

LADY BRACKNELL Algernon is an extremely, I may almost say an ostentatiously, eligible young man. He has nothing, but he looks everything. What more can one desire? 

What a silly thing love is!’ said the student as he walked away. ‘It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. In fact, it is quite unpractical, and, as in this age to be practical is everything, I shall go back to philosophy and study metaphysics.’ So he returned to his room and pulled out a great dusty book, and began to read. 

Down the long and silent street, The dawn, with silver-sandaled feet, Crept like a frightened girl. 

Death is a great price to pay for a red rose’, cried the Nightingale, ‘and Life is very dear to all. ‘ It is pleasant to sit in the green wood, and watch the Sun in his chariot of gold, and the Moon in her chariot of pearl. Sweet is the scent oft he hawthorn, and sweet are the bluebells that hide in the valley, and the heather that blows on the hill. Yet Love is better than Life, and what is the heart of a bird compared to the heart of a man? 

I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself. 

Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic. 

There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one’s fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live, undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. 

Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is 

MRS ALLONBY Is she such a mystery? LORD ILLINGWORTH She is more than a mystery – she is a mood. MRS ALLONBY Moods don’t last. LORD ILLINGWORTH It is their chief charm. 

MRS ALLONBY I adore them. The clever people never listen, and the stupid people never talk. HESTER I think the stupid people talk a great deal. MRS ALLONBY Ah, I never listen! 

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. 

The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. 

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless. 

Vivere e la cosa piu rara nel mondo. Molta gente esiste: ecco tutto. 

MISS PRISM Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us. 

The art is nothing without the gift. But the gift is nothing without work. 

We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. 

Beauty is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight,or springtime, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you…Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed…Ah! realise your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar…Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing…The world belongs to you for a season…how tragic it would be if you were wasted. For there is such a little time that your youth will last. The common hillflowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty, becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to…Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth. 

I did not think I should be ever loved: do you indeed Love me so much as now you say you do? Ask of the sea-bird if it loves the sea, Ask of the roses if they love the rain, Ask of the little lark, that will not sing Till day break, if it loves to see the day: And yet, these are but empty images, Mere shadows of my love, which is a fire So great that all the waters of the main Can not avail to quench it. 

To be popular one must be a mediocrity.’ ‘Not with Women,’ said the duchess, shaking her head; ‘and women rule the world. I assure you we can’t bear mediocrities. We women, as someone says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.’ ‘It seems to me that we never do anything else,’ murmered Dorian. 

Nobody is worthy to be loved. The fact that God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy. Or if that phrase seems to be a bitter one to bear, let us say that everybody is worthy of love, except him who thinks he is. 

Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be-in other ages, perhaps. 

What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb. American novels, answered Lord Henry. 

A method of procuring sensations? Do you think then, that a man who has once committed a murder could possibly do the same crime again? Don’t tell me that.’ says Dorian. ‘Oh! anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often,’ says Lord Henry 

Man is complete in himself. When they go into the world, the world will disagree with them. That is inevitable. The world hates Individualism. But that is not to trouble them. They are to be calm and self-centred. If a man takes their cloak, they are to give him their coat, just to show that material things are of no importance. If people abuse them, they are not to answer back. What does it signify? The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be violent in turn. That would be to fall to the same low level. After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free. His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at peace. And, above all things, they are not to interfere with other people or judge them in any way. Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against society, and yet realise through that sin his true perfection. 

Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for. 

He wants to enslave you.’ ‘I shudder at the thought of being free. 

People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. 

I believe I am to have enough to live on for about eighteen months at any rate, so that if I may not write beautiful books, I may at least read beautiful books; and what joy can be greater? 

Miss Prism: Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days. Cecily: Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily? I don’t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much. Miss Prism: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means. 

If I could get back my youth, I’d do anything in the world except get up early, take exercise or be respectable. 

Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible 

JACK Your duty as a gentleman calls you back. ALGERNON My duty as a gentleman has never interfered with my pleasures in the smallest degree. 

Oh I can’t explain. When I like people immensely I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. 

I don’t like compliments and I don’t see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn’t mean. 

Neither at things, nor at people should one look. Only in mirrors should one look, for mirrors do but show us masks. 

Everyone quoted it, it was full of so many words that they could not understand. 

What the artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals. 

Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man. 

Para la mayoria de nosotros la verdadera vida es la vida que no llevamos. 

When I was young I thought money was the most important thing in life, now that I’m old – I know it is! 

Any place you love is the world to you’, explained the pensive Catherine Wheel, who had been attached to an old deal box in early life, and prided herself on her broken heart; ‘but love is not fashionable any more, the poets have killed it. They wrote so much about that nobody believed them, and I am not surprised. True love suffers, and is silent. I remember myself once- But it is no matter now. Romance is a thing of the past. 

Then I am sorry I did not stay away longer I like being missed. 

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. 

You know I have loved him always. But we are very poor. Who, being loved, is poor? Oh, no one. I hate my riches. They are a burden… 

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless. 

there are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely – or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. 

It is very wrong to kill any one[.]’ ‘Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics! 

Lo! with a little rod I did but touch the honey of romance – And must I lose a soul’s inheritance? 

It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful. 

One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them. 

the Garden of Death’ ‘Yes, death. Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace. You can help me. You can open for me the portals of death’s house, for love is always with you, and love is stronger than death is. 

And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, ‘You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise. 

ya, aku memang seorang pemimpi. karena pemimpi adalah orang yang dapat menemukan jalannya dengan diterangi cahaya bulan, dan orang pertama yang melihat matahari terbit sebelum seluruh dunia melihatnya. 

How pale the Princess is! Never have I seen her so pale. She is like the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver. 

I tremble with pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me. 

The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets. 

Oh, I love London Society! It has immensely improved. It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what Society should be. 

With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols of things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. 

The long black nights, when the moon hides her face, when the stars are afraid, are not so black. The silence that dwells in the forest is not so black. There is nothing in the world so black as thy hair. 

You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. 

One of the requisites of sanity is to disagree with the majority of the British public. 

If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart 

And the wild regrets and the bloody seats None knew so well as I For he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one, must die. 

Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil, cried Dorian with a wild gesture of despair. 

Then she gave one last burst of music. The white Moon heard it, and she forgot the dawn, and lingered on in the sky. The red rose heard it, and it trembled all over with ecstasy, and opened its petals to the cold morning air. Echo bore it to her purple cavern in the hills, and woke the sleeping shepherds from their dreams. It floated through the reeds of the river, and they carried its message to the sea. 

LADY BRACKNELL Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years. Lady Dumbleton is an instance in point. To my own knowledge she has been thirty-five ever since she arrived at the age of forty, which was many years ago now. 

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets make a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize. 

What nonsense people talk about happy marriages!’ exclaimed Lord Henry. ‘ A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her. 

But don’t you think one can be happy when on is married? Perfectly happy. But the happiness of a married man, my dear Gerald, depends on the people he has not married. But if one is in love? One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry. 

You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. I worshipped you. I grew jealous of every one to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself. 

An acquaintance that begins with a compliment is sure to develop into a real friendship. It starts in the right manner. 

Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them. 

And her sweet red lips on these lips of mine Burned like the ruby fire set In the swinging lamp of a crimson shrine, Or the bleeding wounds of the pomegranate, Or the heart of the lotus drenched and wet With the spilt-out blood of the rose-red wine. 

There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other – by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought. 

Man can believe the impossible, but can never believe the improbable 

-Porque posee usted la mas maravillosa juventud, y la juventud es lo mas precioso que se puede poseer. -No lo siento yo asi, lord Henry. -No; no lo siente ahora. Pero algun dia, cuando sea viejo y feo y este lleno de arrugas, cuando los pensamientos le hayan marcado la frente con sus pliegues y la pasion le haya quemado los labios con sus odiosas brasas, lo sentira, y lo sentira terriblemente. Ahora, dondequiera que vaya, seduce a todo el mundo. Sera siempre asi?… Posee usted un rostro extraordinariamente agraciado, senor Gray. No frunza el ceno. Es cierto. Y la belleza es una manifestacion de genio; esta incluso por encima del genio, puesto que no necesita explicacion. Es uno de los grandes dones de la naturaleza, como la luz del sol, o la primavera, o el reflejo en aguas oscuras de esa concha de plata a la que llamamos luna. No admite discusion. Tiene un derecho divino de soberania. Convierte en principes a quienes la poseen. Se sonrie? �Ah! Cuando la haya perdido no sonreira… La gente dice a veces que la belleza es solo superficial. Tal vez. Pero, al menos, no es tan superficial como el pensamiento. Para mi la belleza es la maravilla de las maravillas. Tan solo las personas superficiales no juzgan por las apariencias. El verdadero misterio del mundo es lo visible, no lo que no se ve… Si, senor Gray, los dioses han sido buenos con usted. Pero lo que los dioses dan, tambien lo quitan, y muy pronto. Solo dispone de unos pocos anos en los que vivir de verdad, perfectamente y con plenitud. Cuando se le acabe la juventud desaparecera la belleza, y entonces descubrira de repente que ya no le quedan mas triunfos, o habra de contentarse con unos triunfos insignificantes que el recuerdo de su pasado esplendor hara mas amargos que las derrotas. Cada mes que expira lo acerca un poco mas a algo terrible. El tiempo tiene celos de usted, y lucha contra sus lirios y sus rosas. Se volvera cetrino, se le hundiran las mejillas y sus ojos perderan el brillo. Sufrira horriblemente… �Ah! Disfrute plenamente de la juventud mientras la posee. No despilfarre el oro de sus dias escuchando a gente aburrida, tratando de redimir a los fracasados sin esperanza, ni entregando su vida a los ignorantes, los anodinos y los vulgares. Esos son los objetivos enfermizos, las falsas ideas de nuestra epoca. �Viva! �Viva la vida maravillosa que le pertenece! No deje que nada se pierda. Este siempre a la busca de nuevas sensaciones. No tenga miedo de nada… Un nuevo hedonismo: eso es lo que nuestro siglo necesita. Usted puede ser su simbolo visible. Dada su personalidad, no hay nada que no pueda hacer. El mundo le pertenece durante una temporada… En el momento en que lo he visto he comprendido que no se daba usted cuenta en absoluto de lo que realmente es, de lo que realmente puede ser. Habia en usted tantas cosas que me encantaban que he sentido la necesidad de hablarle un poco de usted. He pensado en la tragedia que seria malgastar lo que posee. Porque su juventud no durara mucho, demasiado poco, a decir verdad. Las flores sencillas del campo se marchitan, pero florecen de nuevo. Las flores del codeso seran tan amarillas el proximo junio como ahora. Dentro de un mes habra estrellas moradas en las clematides y, ano tras ano, la verde noche de sus hojas sostendra sus flores moradas. Pero nosotros nunca recuperamos nuestra juventud. El pulso alegre que late en nosotros cuando tenemos veinte anos se vuelve perezoso con el paso del tiempo. Nos fallan las extremidades, nuestros sentidos se deterioran. Nos convertimos en espantosas marionetas, obsesionados por el recuerdo de las pasiones que nos asustaron en demasia, y el de las exquisitas tentaciones a las que no tuvimos el valor de sucumbir. �Juventud! �Juventud! �No hay absolutamente nada en el mundo excepto la juventud! 

I hate people who talk about themselves, as you do, when one wants to talk about oneself, as I do. 

Do you think that I would not have let you know that, if you suffered, I was suffering too: that if you wept there were tears in my eyes also: and that if you lay in the house of bondage and were despised of men, I out of my griefs had built a house in which to dwell until your coming, a treasury in which all that man had denied to you would be laid up for your healing, one hundredfold in increase? 

My doctor says I must not have any serious conversation after seven [o’clock]. It makes me talk in my sleep. 

It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.’ – Oscar Wilde (Chuck Palahniuk – Pygmy) 

If it was my business, I wouldn’t talk about it. It is very vulgar to talk about one’s business. Only people like stockbroker’s do that, and then merely at dinner parties. 

The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for. People people have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to oneself. 

In the square below,’ said the Happy Prince, ‘there stands a little match-girl. She has let her matches fall in the gutter, and they are all spoiled. Her father will beat her if she does not bring home some money, and she is crying. She has no shoes or stockings, and her little head is bare. Pluck out my other eye, and give it to her, and her father will not beat her.’ ‘I will stay with you one night longer,’ said the Swallow, ‘but I cannot pluck out your eye. You would be quite blind then.’ ‘Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow,’ said the Prince, ‘do as I command you.’ So he plucked out the Prince’s other eye, and darted down with it. He swooped past the match-girl, and slipped the jewel into the palm of her hand. ‘What a lovely bit of glass,’ cried the little girl; and she ran home, laughing. Then the Swallow came back to the Prince. ‘You are blind now,’ he said, ‘so I will stay with you always. 

Basil my dear boy puts everything that is charming in him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices his principles and his common sense. The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet a really great poet is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize. 

Everyone is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling. 

In war,’ answered the weaver, ‘the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children fade away before their time, and the faces of those we love become hard and evil. We tread out the grapes, another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board is empty. We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and are slaves, though men call us free. 

The bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation 

MRS. ALLONBY. It is only fair to tell you beforehand he has got no conversation at all. LADY STUTFIELD. I adore silent men. MRS ALLONBY. Oh, Ernest isn’t silent. He talks the whole time. But he has got no conversation. What he talks about I don’t know. I haven’t listened to him for years. 

Not ‘Forgive us for our sins’ but ‘Smite us for our iniquities’ should be the prayer of man to a most just God. 

Tread Lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow. 

There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral – immoral from the scientific point of view.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here ofr. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion – these are the two things that govern us. And yet […] I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream – I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all maladies of medievalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal – to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. […] We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. … The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. 

Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known 

The living always think that gold can make them happy 

I don’t know that women are always rewarded for being charming. I think they are usually punished for it! 

I am completely penniless, and absolutely homeless. Yet there are worse things in the world than that. 

The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities…. A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions-one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true. 

It’s most dangerous nowadays for a husband to pay any attention to his wife in public. It always makes people think that he beats her when they are alone. The world has grown so suspicious of anything that looks like a happy married life. 

In America, the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefit of their inexperience. 

Weak? Oh, I am sick of hearing that phrase. Sick of using it about others. Weak? Do you really think, that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one’s life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not-there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, terrible courage. I had that courage. 

Do you really think … that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one’s life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not – there is no weakness in that. 

I hope it did not end happily? I don’t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much. 

The great things of life are what they seem to be, and for that reason, strange as it may sound to you, are often difficult to interpret. But the little things of life are symbols. We receive our bitter lessons most easily through them. 

The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain, danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks. 

I know of nothing in all drama more incomparable from the point of view of art, nothing more suggestive in its subtlety of observation, than Shakespeare’s drawing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They are Hamlet’s college friends. They have been his companions. They bring with them memories of pleasant days together. At the moment when they come across him in the play he is staggering under the weight of a burden intolerable to one of his temperament. The dead have come armed out of the grave to impose on him a mission at once too great and too mean for him. He is a dreamer, and he is called upon to act. He has the nature of the poet, and he is asked to grapple with the common complexity of cause and effect, with life in its practical realisation, of which he knows nothing, not with life in its ideal essence, of which he knows so much. He has no conception of what to do, and his folly is to feign folly. Brutus used madness as a cloak to conceal the sword of his purpose, the dagger of his will, but the Hamlet madness is a mere mask for the hiding of weakness. In the making of fancies and jests he sees a chance of delay. He keeps playing with action as an artist plays with a theory. He makes himself the spy of his proper actions, and listening to his own words knows them to be but ‘words, words, words.’ Instead of trying to be the hero of his own history, he seeks to be the spectator of his own tragedy. He disbelieves in everything, including himself, and yet his doubt helps him not, as it comes not from scepticism but from a divided will. Of all this Guildenstern and Rosencrantz realise nothing. They bow and smirk and smile, and what the one says the other echoes with sickliest intonation. When, at last, by means of the play within the play, and the puppets in their dalliance, Hamlet ‘catches the conscience’ of the King, and drives the wretched man in terror from his throne, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz see no more in his conduct than a rather painful breach of Court etiquette. That is as far as they can attain to in ‘the contemplation of the spectacle of life with appropriate emotions.’ They are close to his very secret and know nothing of it. Nor would there be any use in telling them. They are the little cups that can hold so much and no more. 

I am afraid that she is a coquette, for she is always flirting with the wind. 

but love is not fashionable anymore, the poets have killed it. They wrote so much about it that nobody believed them, and I am not surprised. True love suffers, and is silent. I remember myself once-but no matter now. Romance is a thing of the past. 

What are the unreal things, but the passions that once burned one like fire? What are the incredible things, but the things that one has faithfully believed? What are the improbable things? The things that one has done oneself. No, Ernest; life cheats us with shadows, like a puppet- master. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us, with bitterness and disappointment in its train. We come across some noble grief that we think will lend the purple dignity of tragedy to our days, but it passes away from us, and things less noble take its place, and on some grey windy dawn, or odorous eve of silence and of silver, we find ourselves looking with callous wonder, or dull heart of stone, at the tress of gold-flecked hair that we had once so wildly worshipped and so madly kissed. 

What you have told me is quite a romance, a romance of art one might call it, and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic. 

A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent 

In the strangely simple economy of the world people only get what they give, and to those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the mere outward of things and feel pity, what pity can be given save that of scorn? 

We all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man – that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value. 

In literature mere egotism is delightful. 

It was always once springtime in my heart. 

God made the world just as much for me as for any one else. 

Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible. 

Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them. 

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one, 

I should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner. 

Well, she wore far too much rouge last night, and not quite enough clothes. That is always a sign of desperation in a woman. 

It is very difficult sometimes to keep awake, especially at church, but there is no difficulty at all about sleeping. 

There seemed to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance. 

It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it 

The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less. 

Love is a wonderful thing. It is more precious than emeralds and dearer than fine opals. pearls and pomegranates cannot buy it, nor is it set forth in the market-place. It may not be purchased of the merchants, nor can it be weighted out in the balance for gold. 

Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishment on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realise what it has done. When the man’s punishment is over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins. It is really ashamed of its own actions, and shuns those whom it has punished, as people shun a creditor whose debt they cannot pay, or one on whom they have inflicted an irreparable, an irremediable wrong. 

They were evidently people on a low, material plane of existence, and quite incapable of appreciating the symbolic value of sensuous phenomena. 

A sentimentalist is simply one who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. We think we can have our emotions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine. The intellectual and emotional life of ordinary people is a very contemptible affair. Just as they borrow their ideas from a sort of circulating library of thought-the Zeitgeist of an age that has no soul-and send them back soiled at the end of each week, so they always try to get their emotions on credit, and refuse to pay the bill when it comes in. You should pass out of that conception of life. 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. 

When asked what he thought of sports, Oscar Wilde replied, ‘I approve of any activity that requires the wearing of special clothing. 

The world is a stage, but the play is badly written. 

Do you really keep a diary? I’d give anything to look at it. May I? Oh, no. You see, it is simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy. 

I would sooner lose my best friend than my worst enemy. To have friends, you know, one need only be good-natured; but when a man has no enemy left there must be something mean about him. 

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

Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices, there are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even. 

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is a man’s original virtue. 

What a silly thing Love is. It is not as useful as Logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. In fact, it is quite unpractical, and, as in this age to be practical is everything, I shall go back to Philosophy and study Metaphysics. 

anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often, 

One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner. 

When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. 

Well, I ca’ help going to see Sibyl play, even if it is only for an act. I get hungry for her presence; and when I think of the wonderful soul that is hidden away in that little ivory body, I am filled with awe.’ ‘You can dine with me to-night, Dorian, ca’ you?’ He shook his head. ‘To night she is Imogen,’ he answered, ‘and tomorrow night she will be Juliet.’ ‘When is she Sibyl Vane?’ ‘Never.’ ‘I congratulate you. 

When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realising what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal. It would mean that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things that are meant for me as much as for anybody else – the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver – would all be tainted for me, and lose their healing power, and their power of communicating joy. To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul. 

you can only be yourself everybody else is taken 

Being adored is a nuisance. Women treat us just as humanity treats its gods. They worship us, and are always bothering us to do something for them. 

Jemanden zu beeinflussen bedeutet, ihm eine fremde Seele zu geben. 

Did you hear what I was playing, Lane? I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir. 

That is one of the great secrets of life Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes. 

JACK That is nonsense. If I marry a charming girl like Gwendolen, and she is the only girl I ever saw in my life that I would marry, I certainly won’t want to know Bunbury. ALGERNON Then your wife will. You don’t seem to realize, that in married life three is company and two is none. JACK That, my dear young friend, is the theory that the corrupt French Drama has been propounding for the last fifty years. ALGERNON Yes; and that the happy English home has proved in half the time. 

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. 

But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. 

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! 

And now, dear Mr. Worthing, I will not intrude any longer into a house of sorrow. I would merely beg you not to be too much bowed down by grief. What seem to us bitter trials are often blessings in disguise. This seems to me a blessing of an extremely obvious kind. 

while to propose to be a better man is a piece of unscientific cant, to have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered. And such I think I have become. 

How sad it is!’ murmured Dorian Gray with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. ‘How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June… . If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that-for that-I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that! 

It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him. 

If one listens one may be convinced; and a man who allows himself to be convinced by an argument is a thoroughly unreasonable person 

People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion-these are the two things that govern us. And yet- 

I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me, before.’A dream of form in days of thought: 

I make a great difference between people. I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me. Is that very vain of me? I think it is rather vain. 

Common sense, indeed!’ said the Rocket indignantly; ‘you forget that I am very uncommon, and very remarkable. Why, anybody can have common sense, provided that they have no imagination. But I have imagination, for I never think of things as they really are; I always think of them as being quite different. As for keeping myself dry, there is evidently no one here who can at all appreciate an emotional nature. Fortunately for myself, I do’ care. The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated. 

Once in New York, you are sure to be a great success. I know lots of people there who would give a hundred thousand dollars to have a grandfather, and much more than that to have a family ghost. 

When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting. 

One must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusement in life. 

I have been right, Basil, have’ I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth. 

Remember that the fool in the eyes of the gods and the fool in the eyes of man are very different. One who is entirely ignorant of the modes of Art in its revolution or the moods of thought in its progress, of the pomp of the Latin line or the richer music of the vowelled Greeks, of Tuscan sculpture or Elizabethan song may yet be full of the very sweetest wisdom. The real fool, such as the gods mock or mar, is he who does not know himself. I was such a one too long. You have been such a one too long. Be so no more. Do not be afraid. The supreme vice is shallowness. Everything that is realised is right 

Harry,’ said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, ‘every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul. 

Lord AUGUSTUS:(looking around) Time to educate yourself, I suppose. DUMBY: No, time to forget all I have learned. That is much more important. 

Pray do! I think that whenever one has anything unpleasant to say, one should always be quite candid. 

And when wind and winter harden All the loveless land, It will whisper of the garden, You will understand. 

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbor with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. 

Why is it that at a bachelor’s establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne? I ask merely for information. I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand. Good Heavens! Is marriage so demoralizing as that? I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person. 

What are you?’ ‘To define is to limit. 

I do’ at all like knowing what people say of me behind my back. It makes me far too conceited. 

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. 

I talk so trivially about life because I think that life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it. 

In fact, now you mention the subject, I have been very bad in my own small way. I don’t think you should be so proud of that, though I am sure it must have been very pleasant. 

some kill their love when they are young, and some when they are old; some strangle with the hands of lust, some with the hands of gold: THE KINDEST USE A KNIFE, because THE DEAD SO SOON GROW COLD. 

Everybody one meets is a paradox nowadays. It is a great bore. It makes society so obvious. 

One should never give a woman anything she can’t wear in the evening. 

I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. 

To win back my youth, there is nothing I wouldn’t do – except take exercise, get up early, or be a useful member of the community. 

between the famous and the infamous there is but one step, if as much as one 

I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn’t write them down, I should probably forget all about them.’ ‘Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us. 

My dear fellow, I am not quite serious. But I can’t help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves. 

The doctors found out that Bunbury could not live, that is what I mean – so Bunbury died. He seems to have had great confidence in the opinion of his physicians. I am glad, however, that he made up his mind at the last to some definite course of action, and acted under proper medical advice. 

I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself, and I am so clever that I sometimes don’t understand a single word of what I am saying. 

Everyone is brilliant at breakfast. 

If they know nothing of death, it is because they know little of life, for the secrets of life and death belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence of time affects, and who possess not merely the present but the future, and can rise or fall from a past of glory or of shame. Movement, that problem of the visible arts, can be truly realised by Literature alone. It is Literature that shows us the body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest. 

I suppose in about fortnight we shall be told that he has been seen in San Francisco. It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world. 

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it 

MRS ALLONBY Have you tried a good reputation? LORD ILLINGWORTH It is one of the many annoyances to which I have never been subjected. 

LORD ILLINGWORTH. As George Harford I had everything I wanted. Now I have merely everything that other people want, which isn’t nearly so pleasant. 

It is only about things that do not interest one, that one can give a really unbiassed opinion; and this is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always valueless. 

Nothing is more evident than that Nature hates mind. Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity. 

A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them. 

For he to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives. To realise the nineteenth century, one must realise every century that has preceded it and that has contributed to its making. To know anything about oneself one must know all about others. 

It is tragic how few people ever ‘possess their souls’ before they die. ‘Nothing is more rare in any man,’ says Emerson, ‘than an act of his own.’ It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. 

Let those who have not walked as we have done, In the red fire of passion, those whose lives Are dull and colourless, in a word let those, If any such there be, who have not loved, Cast stones against you 

shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. the loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude 

We know not whether laws be right Or whether laws be wrong All we know who lie in gaol Is that the walls are strong And each day is like a year A year whose days are long. 

Life has always poppies in her hands. 

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. 

As he looked back upon man moving through History, he was haunted by a feeling of loss. So much had been surrendered! and to such little purpose!…Hedonism… was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is but itself a moment. 

It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free. 

But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play- I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend. 

The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature 

We caught the tread of dancing feet, We loitered down the moonlit street, And stopped beneath the harlot’s house. Inside, above the din and fray, We heard the loud musicians play The ‘Treues Liebes Herz’ of Strauss. Like strange mechanical grotesques, Making fantastic arabesques, The shadows raced across the blind. We watched the ghostly dancers spin To sound of horn and violin, Like black leaves wheeling in the wind. Like wire-pulled automatons, Slim silhouetted skeletons Went sidling through the slow quadrille, Then took each other by the hand, And danced a stately saraband; Their laughter echoed thin and shrill. Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed A phantom lover to her breast, Sometimes they seemed to try to sing. Sometimes a horrible marionette Came out, and smoked its cigarette Upon the steps like a live thing. Then, turning to my love, I said, ‘The dead are dancing with the dead, The dust is whirling with the dust.’ But she-she heard the violin, And left my side, and entered in: Love passed into the house of lust. Then suddenly the tune went false, The dancers wearied of the waltz, The shadows ceased to wheel and whirl. And down the long and silent street, The dawn, with silver-sandalled feet, Crept like a frightened girl. 

My father told me to go to bed an hour ago. I don’t see why I shouldn’t give you the same advice. I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of ant use to oneself. 

The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable! 

Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction. 

From your silken hair to your delicate feet you are perfection to me. Pleasure hides love from us, but pain reveals it in its essence. 

To make a good salad is to be a brilliant diplomat – the problem is entirely the same in both cases. To know how much oil to mix in with one’s vinegar. 

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating-people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing. 

And each man kills the thing he loves. 

The post on her left was occupied by Mr. Erskine of Treadley, an old gentleman of considerable charm and culture, who had fallen, however, into bad habits of silence, having, as he explained once to Lady Agatha, said everything that he had to say before he was thirty. 

It would be more impressive if it flowed the other way (Commenting on Niagara Falls) 

Love – well, not love at first sight, but love at the end of the season, which is so much more satisfactory. 

The pure and simple truth is, the truth is never pure and simple. 

She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious. 

In America the president reigns for 4 years, and journalism governs for ever and ever. 

Of course, I should have got rid of you. I should have shaken you out of my life as a man shakes from his raiment a thing that has stung him. 

you seem to be displaying signs of triviality. 

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else. That is the misery of being poor. 

Looking around his hotel room not long before expiring: ‘This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has to go. 

When he takes the knife to the canvass the servants find him lying dead with a knife through is heart and ‘withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage.’ and the portrait ‘in all the wonders of his exquisite youth and beauty.’ p 349 

When he takes the knife to the canvass the servants find him lying dead with a knife through is heart and ‘withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage.’ and the portrait ‘in all the wonders of his exquisite youth and beauty.’ p 349 

Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.’ ‘You really must not say things like that before Dorian, Harry.’ ‘Before which Dorian? The one who is pouring out tea for us, or the one in the picture?’ ‘Before either.’ ‘I should like to come to the theatre with you, Lord Henry,’ said the lad. ‘Then you shall come; and you will come, too, Basil, won’t you?’ ‘I can’t, really. I would sooner not. I have a lot of work to do.’ ‘Well, then you and I will go alone, Mr. Gray.’ ‘I should like that awfully.’ The painter bit his lip and walked over, cup in hand, to the picture. ‘I shall stay with the real Dorian,’ he said, sadly. 

The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses. 

Io dispenso sempre buoni consigli… non saprei cosa farmene altrimenti. 

I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one’s life. 

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: … But may I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays. MRS CHEVELEY: Oh, I’m neither. Optimism begins in a broad grin, and Pessimism ends with blue spectacles. Besides, they are both of them merely poses. SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: You prefer to be natural? MRS CHEVELEY: Sometimes. But it is such a very difficult pose to keep up. (Act I., lines 132-140) 

Travel improves the mind wonderfully, and does away with all one’s prejudices. 

Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. 

I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream-I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal-to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get ride of temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it is forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. 

Women try their luck; men risk theirs. 

Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. 

Because you have the most marvellous youth, and youth is the one thing worth having.’ ‘I don’t feel that, Lord Henry.’ ‘No, you don’t feel it now. Some day, when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly. Now, wherever you go, you charm the world. 

Ah! Happy they whose hearts can break And peace of pardon win! How else may man make straight his path And cleanse his soul from sin? How else but through a broken heart May the Lord Christ enter in? 

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike. You dislike me. I am quite aware of that. And I have always detested you. (Mrs. Cheveley) 

My dear boy,’ said Lord Henry, smiling, ‘anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. That is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilized. Civilization is not, by any means, an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which men can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity of being either, so they stagnate. 

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he’ll tell you the truth 

When they make up their ledger, they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy. 

And when you are away, Gerald…with…her – oh, think of me sometimes. Don’t forget me. 

What absurd fellows you are, both of you! I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. 

The only artists I have ever known, who are personally delightful, are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfect uninteresting in what they are. 

Unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow. Romance is the priviledge of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed. The poor shall be practical and prosaic. It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating. 

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly 

Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. 

Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes. It is well to have learned that. 

But you do’ really mean to say that you could’ love me if my name was’ Ernest? GWENDOLEN: But your name is Ernest. JACK: Yes, I know it is. But supposing it was something else? Do you mean to say you could’ love me then? GWENDOLEN (glibly): Ah! that is clearly a metaphysical speculation, and like most metaphysical speculations has very little reference at all to the actual facts of real life, as we know them. 

M. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of Life. 

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ. 

Duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does oneself. 

Never trust a woman who wears mauve. 

When I say that I am convinced of these things I speak with too much pride. Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of God. It is so wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it in a summer’s day. And so a child could. But with me and such as me it is different. One can realise a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet. It is so difficult to keep ‘heights that the soul is competent to gain.’ We think in eternity, but we move slowly through time; and how slowly time goes with us who lie in prison I need not tell again, nor of the weariness and despair that creep back into one’s cell, and into the cell of one’s heart, with such strange insistence that one has, as it were, to garnish and sweep one’s house for their coming, as for an unwelcome guest, or a bitter master, or a slave whose slave it is one’s chance or choice to be. 

It is always painful to part from people whom one has known for a brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity, But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable. 

I like the duchess very much, but I don’t love her.’ ‘And the duchess loves you very much, but she likes you less, so you are excellently matched. 

He was a man of most subtle and refined intellect. A man of culture, charm, and distinction. One of the most intellectual men I ever met.’ ‘I prefer a gentlemanly fool any day. There is more to be said for stupidity than people imagine. Personally I have a great admiration for stupidity. It is a sort of fellow-feeling, I suppose. 

A genius in the daytime and a beauty at night! 

It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. 

We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces 

To get back one’s youth, one has merely to repeat one’s follies. 

To influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. 

It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. It is when we are wounded by our own hands that love should come to cure us. Else what use is love at all? 

The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul. 

When they entered they found, hanging upon the wall, a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognised who it was. 

Life, Lady Stutfield, is simply a mauvais quart d’heure made up of exquisite moments 

You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear. 

Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at. My gods dwell in temples made with hands; and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made perfect and complete: too complete, it may be, for like many or all of those who have placed their heaven in this earth, I have found in it not merely the beauty of heaven, but the horror of hell also. When I think about religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine. Every thing to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith. It has sown its martyrs, it should reap its saints, and praise God daily for having hidden Himself from man. But whether it be faith or agnosticism, it must be nothing external to me. Its symbols must be of my own creating. Only that is spiritual which makes its own form. If I may not find its secret within myself, I shall never find it: if I have not got it already, it will never come to me. 

The value of an idea has nothing to do with the honesty of the man expressing it. 

LORD GORING: (after a long pause) Nobody is incapable of doing a foolish thing. Nobody is incapable of doing a wrong thing. 

The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid others might pick them up. 

LORD GORING: … All I do know is that life cannot be understood without much charity, cannot be lived without much charity. It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world, whatever may. 

I never change. MRS. CHEVELEY: (elevating her eyebrows) Then life has taught you nothing? LADY CHILTERN: It has taught me that a person who has once been guilty of a dishonest and dishonorable action may be guilty of it a second time, and should be shunned. MRS. CHEVELEY: Whould that rule apply to everyone? LADY CHILTERN: Yes, to everyone, without exception. MRS. CHEVELEY: Then I am sorry for you, Gertrude, very sorry for you. 

Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature – it requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist – to sympathise with a friend’s success. 

It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist’s life is that he cannot realize his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realize their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realized, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting point for an ideal that is other than itself. This is why music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret. 

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets. I mean everything that I have said. I have the greatest contempt for optimism. 

The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. 

There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community 

Well, eighteen, then. And I saw you with him the other night at the opera.’ She laughed nervously as she spoke, and watched him with her vague forget-me-not eyes. She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy. Her name was Victoria, and she had a perfect mania for going to church. 

They take their punishment so well, so cheerfully: I go out with an adder in my heart, and an asp in my tongue, and every night I sow thorns in the garden of my soul. 

For the future let those who come to play with me have no hearts 

Genius is born, not paid. 

Never love anybody who treats you like you’re ordinary. 

I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words 

I don’t care about the London season! It is too matrimonial. People are either hunting for husbands, or hiding from them. 

I don’t think I am heartless. Do you?’ ‘You have done too many foolish things during the last fortnight to be entitled to give yourself that name, Dorian,’ answered Lord Henry with his sweet melancholy smile. 

You are remarkably modern, Mabel. A little too modern, perhaps. Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly. 

I blame myself without reserve for my weakness. It was merely weakness. One half-hour with Art was always more to me than a cycle with you. Nothing really at any period of my life was ever of the smallest importance to me compared with Art. But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination. 

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are the artist’s materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feelings, the actor’s craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectators, and not life, that art really mirrors. 

As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime. 

They did not understand a single word of what he was saying, but that made no matter, for they put their heads on one side, and looked wise, which is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier. 

Mourn for Ophelia, if you like. Put ashes on your head because Cordelia was strangled. Cry out against Heaven because the daughter of Brabantio died. But don’t waste your tears over Sibyl Vane. She was less real than they are. 

I wish i could write them down, these little coloured parables or poems that live for a moment in some cell of my brain, and then leave it to go wandering elsewhere. I hate writing; the mere act of writing a thing down is troublesome to me. I want some fine medium, and look for it in vain. 

The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. 

And so he would now study perfumes, and the secrets of their manufacture, distilling heavily-scented oils, and burning odorous gums from the East. He saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not its counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself to discover their true relations, wondering what there was in frankincense that made one mystical, and in ambergris that stirred one’s passions, and in violets that woke the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the brain, and in champak that stained the imagination; and seeking often to elaborate a real psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several influences of sweet-smelling roots, and scented pollen-laden flower, of aromatic balms, and of dark and fragrant woods, of spikenard that sickens, of hovenia that makes men mad, and of aloes that are said to be able to expel melancholy from the soul. 

The critic will certainly be an interpreter, but he will not treat Art as a riddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret may be guessed and revealed by one whose feet are wounded and who knows not his name. Rather, he will look upon Art as a goddess whose mystery it is his province to intensify, and whose majesty his privilege to make more marvellous in the eyes of men. 

For the future let those who come to play with me have no hearts,’ she cried, and she ran out into the garden. 

Your vanity is ridiculous, your conduct an outrage, and your presence in my garden utterly absurd 

She began to complain. Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders. 

The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing. 

What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. 

What seem to us a bitter trials are often blessings in disguise. 

Women have no appreciation of good looks-at least, good women have not. 

Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood 

Those who go beneath the surface, do so at their peril. 

People die of common sense 

It was an ill-omened place. Death walked there in the sunlight. 

In fact, he was dressed for the character of ‘Jonas the Graveless, or the Corpse-Snatcher of Chertsey Barn,’ one of his most remarkable impersonations 

Niagara … is the first disappointment in the married life of many Americans who spend their honeymoon there. 

I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me 

I do’ think that you should tell me that you love me wildly, passionately, devotedly, hopelessly. Hopelessly does’ seem to make much sense, does it? 

I don’t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much. 

Oh my dear fellow…should you not be askind, ‘Would the tea like the cup? 

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age…The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy,intellectual daring; I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colour of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder…I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram. 

The next day the ghost was very weak and tired. The terrible excitement of the last four weeks was beginning to have its effect. His nerves were completely shattered, and he started at the slightest noise. For five days he kept his room, and at last made up his mind to give up the point of the blood-stain on the library floor. If the Otis family did not want it, they clearly did not deserve it. They were evidently people on a low, material plane of existence, and quite incapable of appreciating the symbolic value of sensuous phenomena. The question of phantasmic apparitions, and the development of astral bodies, was of course quite a different matter, and really not under his control. It was his solemn duty to appear in the corridor once a week, and to gibber from the large oriel window on the first and third Wednesdays in every month, and he did not see how he could honourably escape from his obligations. It is quite true that his life had been very evil, but, upon the other hand, he was most conscientious in all things connected with the supernatural. For the next three Saturdays, accordingly, he traversed the corridor as usual between midnight and three o’clock, taking every possible precaution against being either heard or seen. He removed his boots, trod as lightly as possible on the old worm-eaten boards, wore a large black velvet cloak, and was careful to use the Rising Sun Lubricator for oiling his chains. I am bound to acknowledge that it was with a good deal of difficulty that he brought himself to adopt this last mode of protection. However, one night, while the family were at dinner, he slipped into Mr. Otis’s bedroom and carried off the bottle. He felt a little humiliated at first, but afterwards was sensible enough to see that there was a great deal to be said for the invention, and, to a certain degree, it served his purpose. Still, in spite of everything, he was not left unmolested. Strings were continually being stretched across the corridor, over which he tripped in the dark, and on one occasion, while dressed for the part of ‘Black Isaac, or the Huntsman of Hogley Woods,’ he met with a severe fall, through treading on a butter-slide, which the twins had constructed from the entrance of the Tapestry Chamber to the top of the oak staircase. 

The man who says his wife can’t take a joke, forgets she took him. 

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age. 

I understand what you mean, and I believe in this girl. Anyone you love must be marvellous, and any girl that has the effect you describe must be fine and noble. To spiritualise one’s age-that is something worth doing. If this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without one, if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the world. 

The real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. 

MRS ALLONBY You have your looking-glass LORD ILLINGWORTH It is unkind. I merely shows me my wrinkles. MRS ALLONBY Mine is better behaved. It never tells me the truth. LORD ILLINGWORTH Then it is in love with you. 

Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. I hate it. 

I remembered what you had said to me on that wonderful evening we first dined together, about the search for beauty being the real secret of life… 

Have you not sometimes noted, When we unlock some long-disused room With heavy dust and soiling mildew filled, Where never foot of man has come for years, And from the windows take the rusty bar, And fling the broken shutters to the air, And let the bright sun in, how the good sun Turns every grimy particle of dust Into a little thing of dancing gold? Guido, my heart is that long-empty room, But you have let love in, and with its gold Gilded all life. 

Of course to one so modern as I am, `Enfant de mon siecle,’ merely to look at the world will be always lovely. I tremble with pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me. Linnaeus fell on his knees and wept for joy when he saw for the first time the long heath of some English upland made yellow with the tawny aromatic brooms of the common furze; and I know that for me, to whom flowers are part of desire, there are tears waiting in the petals of some rose. It has always been so with me from my boyhood. There is not a single colour hidden away in the chalice of a flower, or the curve of a shell, to which, by some subtle sympathy with the very soul of things, my nature does not answer. Like Gautier, I have always been one of those ‘pour qui le monde visible existe. 

If a woman cannot make her mistakes charming, she is only a female. 

we ca’ stand other people having the same faults as ourselves 

beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich 

We shall be notes in that great Symphony Whose cadence circles through the rhythmic spheres, And all the live World’s throbbing heart shall be Once with our heart 

Olvidar un hecho, es modificar el pasado. 

Faithfulness! I must analyze it some day. The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up. 

Oh, I can’t explain. When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one’s life. I suppose you think me awfully foolish about it? 

There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It is too splendid to be sane. Those of whose lives it forms the dominant note will always seem to the world to be pure visionaries. 

Suddenly I found myself face to face with the young man whose personality had so strangely stirred me. 

I have no ambition to play the part of a mother, and why should I interfere with her illusions? I find it hard enough to keep my own. 

It is said that passion makes one think in a circle. 

The harmony of soul and body – how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, and ideality that is void. 

These days man knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. 

But I loved Narcissus because as he lay on my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw ever my own beauty mirrored. 

Lady Bracknell: Is this Miss Prism a female of repellent aspect, remotely connected with education? Chasuble: (Somewhat indignantly) She is the most cultivated of ladies, and the very picture of respectability. Lady Bracknell: It is obviously the same person. 

She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. 

All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is a crime 

It often happened that when we thought we were experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves. 

I think after Christmas would be better for publication: I am hardly a Christmas present. 

The method by which the fool arrives at his folly was as dear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the wise. 

There is something in that name that seems to inspire absolute confidence. I pity any poor woman whose husband is not called Ernest. 

The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude. 

For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful to us. 

It had brought melancholy across his passions. Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. It had been like conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience. He would destroy it. 

Oh! talk to every woman as if you loved her and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact. 

There is no such thing as good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral- immoral from a scientific point of view. 

My heart shall never be put under their microscope. 

To be good is to be in harmony with ones self. Discord is to be forces to be in harmony with others. 

Life is short, art is infinite. 

We did not dare to breathe a prayer, Or give our anguish scope. Something was dead within each of us, And what was dead was Hope. 

People who shout so loud, my lords, do nothing; the only men I fear are silent men 

Practice precedes perfection. 

With an evening coat and a white tie, as you told me once, anybody, even a stock-broker, can gain a reputation for being civilized. 

LADY BRACKNELL I had some crumpets with Lady Harbury, who seems to me to be living entirely for pleasure now. ALGERNON I hear her hair has turned quite gold from grief. 

Besides, women were better suited to bear sorrow than men. They lived on their emotions. They only thought of their emotions. When they took lovers, it was merely to have some one with whom they could have scenes. 

Yet ruled he not long, so great had been his suffering, and so bitter the fire of his testing, for after the space of three years he died. And he who came after him ruled evilly. 

The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. 

We lose too soon, and only find delight In withered husks of some dead memory. 

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. 

The public is largely influenced by the look of a book. So are we all. It is the only artistic thing about the public. 

Besides, if Hans came here, he might ask me to let him have some flour on credit, and that I could not do. Flour is one thing, and friendship is another, and they should not be confused. Why, the words are spelled differently, and mean quite different things. Everyone can see that. 

strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analysed, women . . . merely adored. 

So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape (…) 

Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions. 

Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shilly-shallying with the question is absurd. Nor do I in any way approve of the modern sympathy with invalids. I consider it morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. Health is the primary duty of life. 

Art is not a thing. It is a way. 

It is simply expression, as Henry says, that gives reality to things. 

Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. 

Nothing really at any period of my life was ever of the smallest importance to me compared with Art. But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination 

I remember your saying once that there is a fatality about good resolutions-that they are always made too late. Mine certainly were. 

You have never been poor, and never known what ambition is. Wealth has given me enormous power. It gave me at the very outset of my life freedom, and freedom is everything. 

There are only two ways, as you know, of becoming civilized. One is by being cultured, the other is by being corrupt. 

The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself. 

For each man kills the thing he loves yet each man does not die he does not die a death of shame on a day of dark disgrace nor have a noose about his neck, nor a cloth upon his face nor drop feet foremost through the floor into an empty space He does not sit with silent men who watch him night and day Who watch him when he tries to weep and when he tries to pray Who watch him lest himself should rob the prison of its prey 

Secret to remain young is to have an inordinate passion for pleasure. 

They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer. 

To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching; to Parnassus there is no primer and nothing that one can learn is ever worth learning. 

It is only an auctioneer who should admire all schools of art. 

artists have sex but art has none 

Anything approaching an explanation is always derogatory to a work of art. 

I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain. 

As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested. 

They actually succeed in spelling his name right in the newspapers. That in itself is fame, on the continent. 

Yet the roses are not less lovely for all that 

And they are unjust to us often, for when they find life bitter they blame us for it, and when they find it sweet we do not taste its sweetness with them. 

If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me. 

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

It is so beautiful that I am sure it has a long Latin name. 

He would never again tempt innocence. He would be good. 

we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly. 

Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing…. 

Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life. 

By the way, Dorian, he (Lord Henry) said, after a pause, what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose – how does the quotation run? – his own soul? 

Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand in our stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happen, of things that are not and that should be. 

Sweet, there is nothing left to say But this, that love is never lost 

The drawback of stealing a thing, is that one never knows how wonderful the thing that one steals is. 

The only things that one can use in fiction are the things that one has ceased to use in fact. 

Lots of people act well, but very few people talk well, which shows that talking is much the more difficult thing of the two, and much the finer thing also. 

passion makes one think in a circle 

each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. it merely intensifies it. 

Society, civilized society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. 

better for him that each sin of his life had brought its sure swift penalty along with it. there was purification in punishment 

All good looks are a snare. They are a snare that every sensible man would like to be caught in. 

A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. 

A true friend stabs you in the front, not the back. 

people who only love once in their lives are really shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or the lack of imagination. Faithlessness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the intellectual life,-simply a confession of failure. 

Every good story-teller nowadays starts with the end, and then goes on to the beginning, and concludes with the middle… 

I can resist everything but temptation. 

Poor Aubrey: I hope he will get all right. He brought a strangely new personality to English art, and was a master in his way of fantastic grace, and the charm of the unreal. His muse had moods of terrible laughter. Behind his grotesques there seemed to lurk some curious philosophy… 

Thou knowest all; I seek in vain What lands to till or sow with seed – The land is black with briar and weed, Nor cares for falling tears or rain. Thou knowest all; I sit and wait With blinded eyes and hands that fail, Till the last lifting of the veil And the first opening of the gate. Thou knowest all; I cannot see. I trust I shall not live in vain, I know that we shall meet again In some divine eternity. 

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

I would sooner have fifty unnatural vices than one unnatural virtue. It is unnatural virtue that makes the world, for those who suffer, such a premature Hell. 

Men marry because they are tired, women because they are curious. Both are disappointed. 

in every pleasure, cruelty has its place… 

I put all my talent into my works; I put my genius into my life 

The basis of every scandal is immoral certainty. 

I love you, I love you, my heart is a rose which your love has brought to bloom, my life is a desert fanned by the delicious breeze of your breath, and whose cool spring are your eyes; the imprint of your little feet makes valleys of shade for me, the odour of your hair is like myrrh, and wherever you go you exhale the perfumes of the cassia tree. Love me always, love me always. You have been the supreme, the perfect love of my life; there can be no other… 

One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempre… It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh. 

The thoroughly well-informed man – that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value. 

Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain. 

The only real people are the people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies. The justification of a character in a novel is not that other persons are what they are, but that the author is what he is. Otherwise the novel is not a work of art. 

Religion?The fashionable substitute for belief. 

The only real people are the people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies. 

I fancy that the true explanation is this: It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us. In the present case, what is it that has really happened? Some one has killed herself for love of you. I wish that I had ever had such an experience. It would have made me in love with love for the rest of my life. The people who have adored me-there have not been very many, but there have been some-have always insisted on living on, long after I had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me. They have become stout and tedious, and when I meet them, they go in at once for reminiscences. That awful memory of woman! What a fearful thing it is! And what an utter intellectual stagnation it reveals! One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar. 

They are more cunning than practical. When they make up their ledger, they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy. 

There are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies. 

He was trying to gather up the scarlet threads of life and weave them into a pattern; to find his way through the sanguine labyrinth of passion through which he was wandering. 

Yes, we are overcharged for everything nowadays. I should fancy that the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich. 

She is a monster, without being a myth, which is rather unfair. 

The people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. (…) Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect – simply a confession of failures 

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. 

The fact is, that I told him a story with a moral.Ah! that is always a very dangerous thing to do, 

The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. 

For what are called criminals nowadays are not criminals at all. Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime. That indeed is the reason why our criminals are, as a class, so absolutely uninteresting from any psychological point of view. They are not marvellous Macbeths and terrible Vautrins. They are merely what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would be if they had not got enough to eat. 

For his mourners will be outcast men And outcasts always mourn… 

If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him. 

He atones for being occasionally somewhat overdressed by being always absolutely over-educated. He is a very modern type. 

I am athirst for thy beauty; I am hungry for thy body; and neither wine nor apples can appease my desire. What shall I do now, Iokanaan? Neither the floods nor the great waters can quench my passion. I was a princess, and thou didst scorn me. I was a virgin, and thou didst take my virginity from me. I was chaste, and thou didst fill my veins with fire . . . 

I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream – I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal – to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. 

Ah! ah! wherefore didst thou not look at me? If thou hadst looked at me thou hadst loved me. Well I know that thou wouldst have loved me, and the mystery of Love is greater than the mystery of Death. 

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. 

One should never take sides in anything, Mr. Kelvil. Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore. 

You should treat the trivial things in life seriously and the serious things in life with a sincere and studied triviality 

Details are always vulgar 

It is personalities, not principles, that move the age 

I am all expectation. 

Yes Harry I believe that is true. I cannot help telling you things. You have a curious influence over me. If I ever did a crime I would come and confess it to you. You would understand me. 

Silently we went round and round, And through each hollow mind The memory of dreadful things Rushed like a dreadful wind, And horror stalked before each man, And terror crept behind. 

Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. Health is the primary duty of life. 

Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates. Art is always more abstract than we fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour-that is all. It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him. 

Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it. 

Art is always more abstract than we fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour – that is all. It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him. 

Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark And has the nature of infinity. 

The separation of spirit from matter was a mystery and the union of spirit with matter was a mystery also. 

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live. It is asking other people to live as one wishes to live. 

One knows so well the popular idea of health: the English country gentleman galloping after a fox – the unspeakable in full pursuit of the unbeatable. 

The English novels are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. But one should not be too severe on them. They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study. 

Mere words.. Was there anything so real as words? 

Rugged and straightforward as he was, there was something in his nature that was purely feminine in its tenderness 

The more he knew, the more he desired to know. He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them. 

When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the only thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. 

We women love with our ears just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all. 

The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it. If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. They are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art. 

Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all. 

He sees all the lovely influences of life as modes of light: the imagination itself is the world of light. The world is made by it, and yet the world cannot understand it: that is because the imagination is simply a manifestation of love, and it is love and the capacity for it that distinguishes one human being from another. 

I have also learnt sympathy with suffering. To me, suffering seems now a sacramental thing, that makes those whom it touches holy. 

My first impressions of people are invariably right. 

Your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks. 

Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. 

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everybody in good society holds exactly the same opinions. 

You have not realized how I have developed. I was a schoolboy when you knew me. I am a man now. I have new passions new thoughts new ideas. I am different but you must not like me less. I am changed but you must always be my friend. 

Yes; she is a peacock in everything but beauty, 

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what it is; and for that reason the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray. 

Utterly, irrevocably, lost 

What a laugh she had!-just like a thrush singing. And how pretty she had been in her cotton dresses and her large hats! She knew nothing, but she had everything that he had lost. 

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. 

Shall Joy wear what Grief has fashioned? 

If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different. 

I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream-I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal-to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. 

There is an unknown land full of strange flowers and subtle perfumes, a land of which it is joy of all joys to dream, a land where all things are perfect and poisonous. 

But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to stave them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic. 

Music had stirred him like that. Music had troubled him many times. But music was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather another chaos, that it created in us. Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give plastic form to formless things, and to have music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of flute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words? 

What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts. 

I would sooner say, or hear it said of me, that I was so typical a child of my age, that in my perversity, and for that perversity`s sake, I turned the good things of my life to evil, and the evil things of my life to good. 

One can realise a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet. 

In love, one always begins in deceiving oneself, and one always ends in deceiving others. 

Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. 

I can not help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates. Art is always more abstract than we fancy. Form and color tell us of form and color-that is all. It often seems to me that art conceals the artist more completely than it ever reveals hi m 

Robert, men can love what is beneath them-things unworthy, stained, dishonoured. We women worship when we love; and when we lose our worship, we lose everything. 

Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. 

to marry into a cloakroom, and form an alliance with a parcel 

Puede recordar usted algun gran error que haya cometido en su juventud, duquesa? -pregunto mirandola- Me temo que de una gran cantidad de ellos -exclamo ella. Entonces cometalos otra vez -dijo el gravemente-. Volver a la juventud es solamente repetir sus locuras. 

love is not safe 

Talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin. 

In her dealings with man, destiny never closed her accounts. 

My own personality has become a burden to me. I want to escape, to go away, to forget. 

You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. 

I am not a Pessimist. Indeed I am not sure that I quite know what Pessimism really means. All I do know is that life cannot be understood without much charity, it cannot be lived without much charity. It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world, whatever may be the explanation of the next. 

A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do. 

the reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. the basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us 

Now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the probabilities are the most insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices. 

Punctuality is the thief of time. 

The girl laughed again. The joy of a caged bird was in her voice. Her eyes caught the melody and echoed it in radiance, then closed for a moment, as though to hide their secret. When they opened, the mist of a dream had passed across them. 

The life that was to make his soul would mar his body. 

Robert, how could you have sold yourself for money? I did not sell myself for money. I bought success at a great price. That is all. 

In every sphere of life, form is the beginning of things. […] Forms are the food of faith, cried Newman in one of those great moments of sincerity that made us admire the know the man. […] The Creeds are believed, not because they are rational, but because they are repeated. 

What are you? To define is to limit. 

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless. OSCAR WILDE 

My dear fellow, I am prepared to prove anything. 

The only possible society is oneself. To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. 

I felt that this grey, monstrous London of ours, with its myriads of people, its sordid sinners and its splendid sins 

Nunca des explicaciones, tus amigos no las necesitan y tus enemigos no las creen 

All charming people are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction. 

But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination. 

You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. 

Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian…I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does. I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes. 

No fim, o desejo era como uma doenca, uma loucura, ou ambas. Deixei de pensar nos outros, desfrutava o prazer onde quer que o encontrasse e seguia adiante. Esqueci que cada pequena acao cotidiana pode fazer ou desfazer um carater e que tudo aquilo que fazemos no segredo da alcova, teremos que confessa-lo um dia, gritando do alto dos telhados. 

The youth of America is their oldest tradition. 

There was a silence. The evening darkened in the room. Noiselessly and with silver feet the shadows crept in from the garden. The colours faded wearily out of things. 

A ti te gusta todo el mundo, o lo que es lo mismo, no te importa nadie 

I suddenly became conscious that some one was looking at me. I turned half-way round and saw Dorian Gray for the first time. When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself. 

Dorian Gray listened, open-eyed and wondering. The spray of lilac fell from his hand upon the gravel. A furry bee came and buzzed round it for a moment. Then it began to scramble all over the oval stellated globe of the tiny blossoms. He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression, or when some though that terrifies us lays sudden siege to the brain and calls on us to yield. 

Yet, as has been said of him before, no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself. He felt keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment. He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal. 

I get hungry for her presence; and when I think of the wonderful soul that is hidden away in that little ivory body, I am filled with awe. 

Bitter, bitter was the pain, and wilder and wilder grew her song, for she sang of the Love that is perfected by Death, of the Love that dies not in the tomb. 

The past could always be annihilated; regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable. There were passions in him that would find their terrible outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of their evil real. 

Conciencia y cobardia son lo mismo realmente, Basil. La conciencia es el nombre comercial de la empresa. Eso es todo 

I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself do not interest me. The have not got the charm of novelty. 

His nature had developed like a flower, had borne blossoms of scarlet flame. Out of its secret hiding-place had crept his Soul, and Desire had come to meet it on the way. 

An admirable idea! Mr. Worthing, there is just one question I would like to be permitted to put to you. Where is your brother Ernest? We are both engaged to be married to your brother Ernest, so it is a matter of some importance to us to know where your brother Ernest is at present. 

Creo que el arte oculta al artista mas que lo descubre 

The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone. In the case of the novel and the drama, arts in which the public do take an interest, the result of the exercise of popular authority has been absolutely ridiculous. No country produces such badly-written fiction, such tedious, common work in the novel form, such silly, vulgar plays as England. It must necessarily be so. The popular standard is of such a character that no artist can get to it. It is at once too easy and too difficult to be a popular novelist. It is too easy, because the requirements of the public as far as plot, style, psychology, treatment of life, and treatment of literature are concerned are within the reach of the very meanest capacity and the most uncultivated mind. It is too difficult, because to meet such requirements the artist would have to do violence to his temperament, would have to write not for the artistic joy of writing, but for the amusement of half-educated people, and so would have to suppress his individualism, forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender everything that is valuable in him. 

Moral grounds are always the last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty. 

Cuando somos felices siempre somos buenos, pero cuando somos buenos no siempre somos felices 

to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world, 

What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. 

You are an extraordinary fellow. You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose. 

Nor do I in any way approve of the modern sympathy with invalids. I consider it morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. 

You know how I love secrecy. It is the only thing that can make modern life wonderful or mysterious to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. 

But he suddenly started up, and closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake. 

Women are made to be loved, not to be understood. 

If we women did not love you for your defects, where would you all be? Not one of you would ever be married. You would be a set of unfortunate bachelors. Not, however, that that would alter you much. 

He did not wring his hands, as do Those witless men who dare To try to rear the changeling Hope In the cave of black Despair. 

There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true… 

Un matrimonio dovrebbe basarsi sulla reciproca incomprensione. 

It lies like a leper in purple, it sits like a dead thing smeared with gold. 

Das wirkliche Leben war Chaos, aber es lag eine schreckliche Logik in der Phantasie. 

But Venice, like Oxford, had kept the background for romance, and, to the true romantic, background was everything, or almost everything. 

Here are two chairs; let us sit down and see the smart people go by. 

He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvelous and evil so full of subtlety. 

I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations. 

The Noblest form of Affection 

Everyone is born a king; some people die in exile 

it is a marvel that those red-roseleaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing. 

the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, 

Your days are your sonnets. 

But you will tell me this is an inartistic age, and we are an inartistic people, and the artist suffers much in this nineteenth century of ours. Of course he does. I, of all men, am not going to deny that. But remember that there has never been an artistic age, or an artistic people since the beginning of the world. The artist has always been, and will always be, an exquisite exception. 

nothing is worth doing except what the world says is impossible. 

Adevarul despre casatorie este acela ca te face sa nu mai fi egoist. Iar oamenii lipsiti de egoism sun incolori. Le lipseste individualitatea 

I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself, 

One should not look at anything. Neither at things, nor at people should one look. Only in mirrors is it well to look, for mirrors do but show us masks. 

For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is. 

Ah! thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan. Well! I will kiss it now. I will bite it with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit. Yes, I will kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan. I said it; did I not say it? I said it. Ah! I will kiss it now . . . . But wherefore dost thou not look at me, Iokanaan? Thine eyes that were so terrible, so full of rage and scorn, are shut now. Wherefore are they shut? Open thine eyes! Lift up thine eyelids, Iokanaan! Wherefore dost thou not look at me? Art thou afraid of me, Iokanaan, that thou wilt not look at me? 

Exploded! Was he the victim of a revolutionary outrage? I was not aware that Mr. Bunbury was interested in social legislation. If so, he is well punished for his morbidity. 

When the prurient and the impotent attack you, be sure you are right. 

I suppose one must be serious sometimes. 

Ah, Iokanaan, Iokanaan, thou wert the man that I loved alone among men! All other men were hateful to me. But thou wert beautiful! Thy body was a column of ivory set upon feet of silver. It was a garden full of doves and lilies of silver. It was a tower of silver decked with shields of ivory. There was nothing in the world so white as thy body. There was nothing in the world so black as thy hair. In the whole world there was nothing so red as thy mouth. Thy voice was a censer that scattered strange perfumes, and when I looked on thee I heard a strange music. Ah! wherefore didst thou not look at me, Iokanaan? 

Hello, I am Oscar Wilde 

I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves. 

It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. 

When poverty creeps in at the door, love flies through the window. 

The rich would have spoken on the value of thrift and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour. 

The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. 

I had been foolish in imagining that I had seen anything in it, more than that you were extremely good looking, and that I could paint. 

You cut life to pieces with your epigrams. 

Of course I need not remind you how fluid a thing thought is with me- with us all- and of what an evanescent substance are our emotions made. 

Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul? 

I believe that you are really a very good husband but that you are thoroughly ashamed of your own virtues. You are an extraordinary fellow. You never say a moral thing and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose. 

He who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die. 

Have some bread and butter. The bread and butter is for Gwendolen. Gwendolen is devoted to bread and butter. 

Do you know I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world. Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance. It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. 

I believe I am to have enough to live on for about eighteen months at any rate, so that, if I may not write beautiful books, I may at least read beautiful books, and what joy can be greater? 

Cada um de nos tem em si o Ceu e o Inferno 

I will love you always, because you will always be worthy of love. 

If the doors of perception were cleared everything will appear to us as it is, infinite 

To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead. 

the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. 

Examinations consist of the foolish asking questions the wise cannot answer 

As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. 

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. 

It was only in the theatre that I lived. 

The sunlight slipped over the polished leaves. 

I forgot that little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has someday to cry aloud on the housetops. 

Untruthful! My nephew Algernon? Impossible! He is an Oxonian. 

He loves first editions, especially of women: little girls are his passion. 

The girl laughed again. The joy of a caged bird was in her voice. 

I would merely beg you not to be too much bowed down by grief. What seem to us bitter trails are often blessings in disguise. 

Besides, women were better suited to bear sorrow than men. 

Even if I had not been waiting but had shut the doors against you, you should have remembered that no one can possibly shut the doors against love forever. 

Indeed, in many respects, she was quite English, and was an excellent example of the fact that we have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language. 

She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she kept all her illusions. She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy. 

It is always painful to part from people whom one has known for a very brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity. But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable. 

The more the public is interested in artists, the less it is interested in art. The personality of the artist is not a thing the public should know about. It is too accidental. 

For he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die. 

I rely on you to misrepresent me. 

Oh! I killed Bunbury this afternoon… I mean poor Bunbury died this afternoon. What did he die of? Bunbury? Oh, he was exploded! 

I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets. 

The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. And unselfish people are colourless. They lack individuality. 

Define us as a sex. LORD ILLINGWORTH Sphinxes without secrets. 

I am not sorry for anything that has happened. It has taught me to know myself better. 

My gods dwell in temples made with hands. 

And Sleep will not lie down, but walks Wild-eyed and cries to Time. 

The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. 

When is she Sibyl Vane?Never. 

You see, it is a very dangerous thing to listen. If one listens one may be convinced; and a man who allows himself to be convinced by an argument is a thoroughly unreasonable person. 

For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. 

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey 

Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions. 

I should be sorry to be on the same level as an age like this. 

What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. 

Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you-well, of course you have an intellectual expression, and all that. But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself an exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. 

Marriage is hardly a thing that one can do now and then, Harry. Except in America, rejoined Lord Henry, languidly. 

What is beautiful is a joy for all seasons and a possession for all eternity. 

To the philosopher women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals. 

I must confess that most modern mysticism seems to me to be simply a method of imparting useless knowledge in a form that no one can understand 

Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say. 

What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than begin talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion. 

My own one, I have never loved anyone in the world but you. 

Yet each man kills the things he loves 

There is a luxury in self-reproach. 

If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart, 

Art, even the art of fullest scope and widest vision, can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognisance. And the soul itself, the soul of each one of us, is to each one of us a mystery. It hides in the dark and broods, and consciousness cannot tell us of its workings. Consciousness, indeed, is quite inadequate to explain the contents of personality. It is Art, and Art only, that reveals us to ourselves. 

O wandering graves! O restless sleep! O silence of the sunless day! O still ravine! O stormy deep! Give up your prey! Give up your prey! 

Hay muchas cosas que abandonariamos si no temieramos que otros pudiesen recogerlas. 

I remember having read somewhere, in some strange book, that when the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers. 

You are unjust to women in England. And till you count what is a a shame in a woman to be an infamy in a man, you will always be unjust, and Right, that pillar of fire, and Wrong, that pillar of cloud, will be made dim to your eyes, or be not seen at all, or if seen, not regarded. 

The whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people. 

Like silver moons the pale narcissi lay 

His principles were out of date, but there was a good deal to be said for his prejudices. 

Alma e corpo, corpo e alma, como eram misteriosos! Havia animalismo na alma, e o corpo possuia momentos de espiritualidade. 

Her ivory hands on the ivory keys Strayed in a fitful fantasy, Like the silver gleam when the poplar trees Rustle their pale leaves listlessly, Or the drifting foam of a restless sea When the waves show their teeth in the flying breeze. 

La tragedia de la vejez no consiste en ser viejo, sino en haber sido joven. 

Come, I tell you. You have chattered enough about corruption. Now you shall look on it face to face! 

Una rosa se desperto en su sangre y ensombrecio sus mejillas. Un agitado aliento separo los petalos de sus labios, que temblaron. Sobre ella soplo algun viento sur de pasion y movio los delicados pliegos de su vestido 

I often wonder what would have happened to those in pain if, instead of Christ, there had been a Christian. 

The moment I met you I saw that you were quite unconscious of what you really are, of what you really might be. There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself. I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted. 

Ya sabes que nosotros, los pobres artistas, tenemos que aparecer en sociedad de cuando en cuando para recordar al publico que no somos salvajes. 

The Americans are an extremely interesting people. They are absolutely reasonable. I think that is their distinguishing characteristic…I assure you there is no nonsense about the Americans. 

secret. To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable. 

To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul. 

He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression, or when some thought that terrifies us lays sudden siege to the brain and calls on us to yield. 

beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. 

I would give my soul for that! 

sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake. 

A grapefruit is ionly a lemon that saw an oppurtunity and took advantage of it. 

Nowadays all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men. 

In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man-that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value. 

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what it is… 

past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it. 

You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. 

He is some brainless beautiful creature who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence. 

We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth! 

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love. Sibyl Vane seemed to him to be absurdly melodramatic. Her tears and sobs annoyed him. 

Why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself? 

You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow and its beauty. 

I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have searched for pleasure. 

Demmed nuisance, relations! But they make one so demmed respectable. 

Romantic art begins with its climax. 

He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul. 

Hay muchas cosas de las que nos desprenderiamos si no tuvieramos miedo de que otros las recogieran. 

it was never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be. 

And this love of definite conception, this clearness of vision, this artistic sense of limit, is the characteristic of all great work and poetry; of the vision of Homer as of the vision of Dante, of Keats and William Morris as of Chaucer and Theocritus. It lies at the base of all noble, realistic and romantic work as opposed to the colourless and empty abstractions of our own eighteenth-century poets and of the classical dramatists of France, or of the vague spiritualities of the German sentimental school: opposed, too, to that spirit of transcendentalism which also was root and flower itself of the great Revolution, underlying the impassioned contemplation of Wordsworth and giving wings and fire to the eagle- like flight of Shelley, and which in the sphere of philosophy, though displaced by the materialism and positiveness of our day, bequeathed two great schools of thought, the school of Newman to Oxford, the school of Emerson to America. Yet is this spirit of transcendentalism alien to the spirit of art. For the artist can accept no sphere of life in exchange for life itself. For him there is no escape from the bondage of the earth: there is not even the desire of escape. He is indeed the only true realist: symbolism, which is the essence of the transcendental spirit, is alien to him. The metaphysical mind of Asia will create for itself the monstrous, many-breasted idol of Ephesus, but to the Greek, pure artist, that work is most instinct with spiritual life which conforms most clearly to the perfect facts of physical life. 

Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; 

The walls were hung with rich tapestries representing the Triumph of Beauty. A large press, inlaid with agate and lapis-lazuli, filled one corner, and facing the window stood a curiously wrought cabinet with lacquer panels of powdered and mosaiced gold, on which were placed some delicate goblets of Venetian glass, and a cup of dark-veined onyx. Pale poppies were broidered on the silk coverlet of the bed, as though they had fallen from the tired hands of sleep, and tall reeds of fluted ivory bare up the velvet canopy, from which great tufts of ostrich plumes sprang, like white foam, to the pallid silver of the fretted ceiling. A laughing Narcissus in green bronze held a polished mirror above its head. On the table stood a flat bowl of amethyst. 

I did not want any external influence in my life. You know how independent I am by nature. I have always been my own master; had at least always been so, till I met Dorian Gray. 

I am afraid it is quite clear, Cecily, that neither of us is engaged to be married to any one. 

Are ALL men bad? Oh, all of them, my dear, all of them, without any exception. And they never grow any better. Men become old, but they never become good.. 

How you men stand up for each other! How you women war against each other! 

he had been filled with terror lest other eyes should look upon it. It had brought melancholy across his passions. Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. It had been like conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience. He would destroy it. 

I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself. 

And beauty is a form of genius-is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. 

Unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh new school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. The harmony of soul and body – how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void. Harry! If only you knew what Dorian Gray is to me! 

The trouble with Marxism is that it takes up too many evenings. 

For myself, the only immortality I desire is to invent a new sauce. 

We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. 

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist-that is all. 

wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational. 

I feel I must come with you. And will you talk to me all the time? No one talks so wonderfully as you do. 

You see, it is a very dangerous thing to listen. If one listens one may be convinced; and a man who allows himself to be convinced by an argument is a thoroughly unreasonable person. lady basildon. 

very essence of romance is uncertainty. 

Through vanity he had spared her. 

Lord Henry, you are quite delightful and dreadfully demoralizing. 

When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution. 

Dale una mascara a un hombre y te dira la verdad 

are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. 

Cupids laughed round it as of old. 

As the door closed behind them, the painter flung himself down on a sofa, and a look of pain came into his face. 

But there is no such thing, sir, as a ghost, and I guess the laws of Nature are not going to be suspended for the British aristocracy 

When one is in love one begins by deceiving oneself, and one ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance. 

I cannot repeat an emotion. No one can, except sentimentalists. 

It is only the sacred things that are worth touching, Dorian 

There was evidently no time to be lost, so, hastily adopting the Fourth dimension of Space as a means of escape, he vanished through the wainscoting, and the house became quite quiet. 

Love is a more wonderful thing than art. 

Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything. 

Sincerity is the last refuge of the shallow. 

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. 

Really the answers I get are idiotic. The entire correspondence of you and Robbie with me should be published. The best title would be Letters from Two Idiots to a Lunatic, I should fancy. 

Complex people waste half their strength in trying to conceal what they do. Is it any wonder they should always come to grief? 

I am getting rather astonishing in my Italian conversation. I believe I talk a mixture of Dante and the worst modern slang. 

But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play- I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend. Browning writes about that somewhere; but our own senses will imagine them for us. There are moments when the odour of lilas blanc passes suddenly across me, and I have to live the strangest month of my life over again. 

The world has cried out against us both, but it has always worshipped you. 

You have crushed the grapes against your palate. Nothing has been hidden from you. And it has all been to you no more than the sound of music. It has not marred you. 

In the cave of black Despair: He only looked upon the sun, And drank the morning air. 

Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about, 

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read 

Be not spendthrift of your honesty, But keep it to yourself 

The secret seems to be the only way to become mysterious and wonderful modern life. The commonest thing gets a touch fascinating when done on the sly. 

We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. 

No married man is ever attractive except to his wife. 

Colonel. Can she read and write? Peter. Ay, that she can, sir. Colonel. Then she is a dangerous woman. 

The truth is rarely pure 

Meredith is a prose Browning. So is Browning. 

LADY BRACKNELL: It is my last reception, and one wants something that will encourage conversation, particularly at the end of the season when every one has practically said whatever they had to say, which, in most cases, was probably not much. 

The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. 

Soul and body, body and soul- how mysterious they were! 

Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. 

If we lived long enough to see the results of our actions, it may be that those who call themselves good would be sickened with a dull remorse, and those whom the world calls evil stirred by a noble joy. Each little thing we do passes into the great machine of life, which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new civilization, more marvelous and more splendid than any that has gone before. 

If this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without one, if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the world. 

ALLONBY.-La ventaja de jugar con fuego, lady Caroline, es que no nos quemamos. Solo se quema la gente que no sabe jugar con el. 

Do you smoke? Jack. Well, yes, I must admit I smoke. Lady Bracknell. I am glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind. 

He lives the poetry that he cannot write; the others write the poetry that they dare not realize. 

Worlds had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow…. 

Whatever music sounds like, I am glad to say it does not sound in the smallest degree like German. 

Only England could have produced him, and he always said that the country was going to the dogs. 

To know the vintage and quality of a wine one need not drink the whole cask. It must be perfectly easy in half an hour to say whether a book is worth anything or worth nothing. Ten minutes are really sufficient, if one has the instinct for form. Who wants to wade through a dull volume? One tastes it, and that is quite enough -more than enough, I should imagine. 

As for marriage, of course that would be silly, but there are other and more interesting bonds between men and women. 

Do you smoke? Jack. Well, yes, I must admit I smoke. Lady Bracknell. I am glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind. There are far too many idle men in London as it is. 

and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic. 

love is not fashionable any more, the poets have killed it. 

My dear fellow why have you any reason? What odd chaps you painters are. You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. 

It takes a thoroughly good woman to do a thoroughly stupid thing. 

Some red star had come too close to the earth. 

Now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. 

I could deny myself the pleasure of talking, but not to others the pleasure of listening. 

resist nothing but temptation 

To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger, and danger has become so rare in modern life. 

How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being? 

unmown grass 

keep love in your heart 

A misanthrope I can understand-a womanthrope, never! 

Sin is the only color- element left in modern life. 

Lord Henry smiled. People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity. 

She is all the great heroines of the world in one. 

Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good. 

What is the difference between scandal and gossip? Oh! gossip is charming! History is merely gossip, but scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. 

The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ. 

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst 

every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. the sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. 

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable.They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf. 

No artist has ethical sympathies. 

Besides, every experience is of value, and whatever one may say against marriage, it is certainly an experience. 

The Odyssey was written by Homer, or another Greek of the same name. 

And your eyes, they were green and grey Like an April day, But lit into amethyst When I stooped and kissed; And your mouth, it would never smile For a long, long while, Then it rippled all over with laughter Five minutes after. You were always afraid of a shower, Just like a flower: I remember you started and ran When the rain began. I remember I never could catch you, For no one could match you, You had wonderful, luminous, fleet, Little wings to your feet. 

I admit that i think it is better to be beautiful then to be good. But on the other hand no one is more ready to admit then i, it is better to be good then ugly. 

Ah! then it must be an illusion. The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance. 

I never intend to grow old. The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. 

I should fancy that the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. 

It was a poor thing she felt for anyone to be born a foreigner. 

And Beauty is a form of Genius – is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. 

I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. 

Women spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. 

loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. 

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art 

Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that. 

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing 

That is one of the secrets of life – to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul. You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know. 

Cecily: Oh, yes. Dr. Chasuble is a most learned man. He has never written a single book, so you can imagine how much he knows. 

In matters of great importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing. 

Oh! Anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often. 

Nay, without thought or conscious desire, might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods and passions, atom calling to atom in secret love or strange affinity? 

Threads snap. You would lose your way in the labyrinth. 

How extraordinary! I thought you would never care for anything but your art.He is all my art to me now. 

Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed. 

Me, sir! What has it to do with me? You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter – a girl brought up with the utmost care – to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel? Good morning, Mr. Worthing! 

the secrets of art are best learned in secret, and that Beauty, like Wisdom, loves the lonely worshipper. 

I am dying beyond my means 

I have forgotten all about my school days. I have a vague impression that they were detestable. 

Intellect is in itself an exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. 

Questions are never indiscreet.Answers sometimes are. 

He was like a common gardener walking with a rose. 

Better to take pleasure in a rose than to put its root under a microscope. 

Indeed, as a rule, everybody turns out to be somebody else. 

People are either hunting for husbands, or hiding from them. 

Wishing to make an effective entrance, he flung it wide open, when a heavy jug of water fell right down on him, wetting him to the skin, and just missing his left shoulder by a couple of inches. At the same moment he heard stifled shrieks of laughter proceeding from the four-post bed. 

Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy. 

As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. 

When poverty creeps in at the door, love flies in through the window. 

There is nothing like race, is there? 

The only horrible thing in the world is ennui, 

Whatever one writes, comes to pass. 

We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and are slaves, though men call us free. 

My dear fellow, the way you flirt with Gwendolen is perfectly disgraceful. It is almost as disgraceful as the way Gwendolen flirts with you. 

High above the city, on a tall column, stood the statue of the Happy Prince. He was gilded all over with thin leaves of fine gold, for eyes he had two bright sapphires, and a large red ruby glowed on his sword-hilt. 

It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. 

the serious study of the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing. 

But this murder-was it to dog him all his life? Was he always to be burdened by his past? Was he really 

When he had been away, he had been filled with terror lest other eyes should look upon 

Ah! that is the great thing in life, to live the truth. 

Psychology is in its infancy, as a science. I hope, in the interests of Art, it will always remain so. 

It was better to know the worst, whatever it was, than to be left in this hideous uncertainty. 

You might see nothing in him. I see everything in him. He is never more present in my work than when no image of him is there. He is a suggestion, as I have said, of a new manner. I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours. That is all. 

For it was an unjust mirror, this mirror of his soul that he was looking at. Vanity? Curiosity? Hypocrisy? Had there been nothing more in his renunciation than that? There had been something more. 

Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They discover everything except the obvious. 

Dorian Gray frowned and turned his head away. He could not help liking the tall, graceful young man who was standing by him. His romantic, olive-coloured face and worn expression interested him. There was something in his low languid voice that was absolutely fascinating. His cool, white, flowerlike hands, even, had a curious charm. They moved, as he spoke, like music, and seemed to have a language of their own. But he felt afraid of him, and ashamed of being afraid. 

Jack. [After some hesitation.] I know nothing, Lady Bracknell. Lady Bracknell. I am pleased to hear it. I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square. 

The terror of a child in prison is quite limitless 

The is nothing that art cannot express 

As he passed out, he used to look with wonder at the black confessionals and long to sit in the dim shadow of one of them and listen to men and women whispering through the worn grating the true story of their lives. 

And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value. 

It will be a marvellous thing – the true personality of man – when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply, flowerlike, or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing. And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be. It will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself. It will love them because they will be different. And yet while it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing helps us, by being what it is. The personality of man will be very wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child. 

All I want now is to look at life. You may come and look at it with me, if you care to. 

He read of the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde that weeps tears of granite in its lonely sunless exile and longs to be back by the hot, lotus-covered Nile. 

those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. 

Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob 

No son of mine should ever take the side of the Puritans: that is always an error. 

But he felt afraid of him, and ashamed of being afraid. Why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself? 

He was dreadfully short-sighted, and there was no pleasure in taking a husband who never sees anything. 

At least, I have not made my heart a heart of stone, Nor starved my boyhood of is goodly feast, Nor walked where beauty is a thing unknown. 

Yesterday evening Mrs. Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking at the glorious sky, as she called it. Of course I had to look at it. She is one of those absurdly pretty Philistines to whom one can deny nothing. And what was it? It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period 

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old but that one is young. 

To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders…It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances 

A strange sense of loss came over him. He felt that Dorian Gray would never again be to him all that he had been in the past. Life had come between them…. His eyes darkened, and the crowded, flaring streets became blurred to his eyes. When the cab drew up at the theatre, it seemed to him that he had grown years older. 

My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. 

Every experience is of value. 

Sometimes we can spend years without living at all, and suddenly our whole life is concentrated in a single moment . 

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. 

I am not laughing Dorian; at least I am not laughing at you. But you should not say the greatest romance of your life. /you should say the first romance of your life. You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. 

The people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. 

Twisted minds are as natural to some people as twisted bodies. 

He says things that annoy me. He gives me good advice. 

Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing. 

One should always play fairly… when one has the winning cards. 

y. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live-undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. 

As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves, and rarely understood others. 

No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him…As for the virtuous poor…they have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very poor pottage. 

I hardly think that any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously propose that an inspector should call every morning at each house to see that each citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight hours. 

There was blood on the painted feet, as though the thing had dripped-blood even on the hand that had not held the knife. 

To introduce real people into a novel or a play is a sign of an unimaginative mind, a coarse, untutored observation and an entire absence of style. 

The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to some one else, if she is plain. 

The joy of a caged bird was in her voice. 

The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and sold, and bartered away. It can be poisoned, or made perfect. There is a soul in each one of us. I know it. 

Death is the brother of Sleep, is he not? 

As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. 

Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square. 

The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes, 

He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize. 

I think thy spirit hath passed away From these white cliffs and high-embattled towers; This gorgeous fiery-coloured world of ours Seems fallen into ashes dull and grey 

I have come up to town expressly to propose to her. Algernon. I thought you had come up for pleasure? . . . I call that business. 

the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect – simply a confession of failure. a 

Beauty is a form of Genius-is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it. 

He did not wear his scarlet coat, For blood and wine are red, And blood and wine were on his hands When they found him with the dead 

But surely it is something to have been The best beloved for a little while, To have walked hand in hand with Love, and seen His purple wings flit once across thy smile. 

women love us for our defects; if we have enough of them they will forgive us everything 

A dreamer is one who can only find her way by moonlight. 

True. In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing. 

To be in Society is merely a bore. But to be out of it simply a tragedy. Society is a necessary thing. 

Against these turbid turquoise skies The light and luminous blloons Dip and drift like satin moons, Drift like silken butterflies 

And at my feet the pale green Thames Lies like a rod of rippled jade. 

this young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves. 

They have been through the fire, and what fire does not destroy, it hardens. She has had experiences. 

Comfort is the only thing our civilisation can give us. 

for that there was no atonement; but though forgiveness was impossible, forgetfulness was possible still, 

It is pure unadulterated country life. They get up early because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about. 

No one in particular. A man of no importance. CURTAIN 

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty. 

waning. He was perfectly safe there. Nor, indeed, was it the death of Basil Hallward that weighed most upon his mind. It was the living death of his own soul that troubled him. Basil had painted the portrait that had marred his life. 

A new life! That was what he wanted. That was what he was waiting for. Surely he 

Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators 

But now and then a complex personality took the place and assumed the office of art, was indeed, in its way, a real work of art, life having its elaborate masterpieces, just as poetry has, or sculpture, or painting. 

Society-civilized society, at least-is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef … Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees… 

The harmony of soul and body – how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void. 

Each man lived his own life, and paid his own price for living it. 

One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. 

No need to waste the foolish tear, Or heave the windy sigh: The man had killed the thing he loved, And so he had to die. 

Some subtle influence passed from him to me, and for the first time in my life I saw in the plain woodland the wonder I had always looked for, and always missed. 

Dorian is far too wise not to do foolish things now and then, 

The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live-undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. 

I ask merely for information. 

My sermon on the meaning of the manna in the wilderness can be adapted to almost any occasion, joyful, or, as in the present case, distressing. [All sigh.] I have preached it at harvest celebrations, christenings, confirmations, on days of humiliation and festal days. 

The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves. 

The gods have given me almost everything. But i let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. 

No need to waste the foolish tear, Or heave the windy sigh: The man had killed the thing he loved, And so he had to die. And all men kill the thing they love, By all let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword! 

I He did not wear his scarlet coat, For blood and wine are red, And blood and wine were on his hands When they found him with the dead, The poor dead woman whom he loved, And murdered in her bed. He walked amongst the Trial 

One has a right to judge of a man by the effect he has over his friends. 

Los hombres se casan por fatiga; las mujeres, por curiosidad. Ambos sufren un desengano. 

Gradually the events of the preceding night crept with silent, blood-stained feet into his brain and reconstructed themselves there with terrible distinctness. He winced at the memory of all that he had suffered, and for a moment the same curious feeling of loathing for Basil Hallward that had made him kill him as he sat in the chair came back to him, and he grew cold with passion. The dead man was still sitting there, too, and in the sunlight now. How horrible that was! Such hideous things were for the darkness, not for the day. 

It will, of course, be said that such a scheme as is set forth here is quite unpractical, and goes against human nature. This is perfectly true. It is unpractical, and it goes against human nature. This is why it is worth carrying out, and that is why one proposes it. For what is a practical scheme? A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under existing conditions. But it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to; and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. 

JACK: I will be back in a few moments, dear Canon. Gwendolen! Wait here for me! GWENDOLEN: If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life. 

The criminal classes are so close to us that even the policemen can see them. They are so far away from us that only the poet can understand them. 

No sooner, in fact, had I sent it off than a curious reaction came over me. It seemed to me that I had given away my capacity for belief in the Willie Hughes theory of the Sonnets, that something had gone out of me, as it were, and that I was perfectly indifferent to the whole subject. What was it that had happened? It is difficult to say, perhaps, by finding perfect expression for a passion I had exhausted the passion itself. Emotional forces, like the forces of physical life, have their positive limitations. Perhaps the mere effort to convert any one to a theory involves some form of renunciation of the power of credence. Perhaps I was simply tired of the whole thing, and, my enthusiasm having burnt out, my reason was left to its own unimpassioned judgment. However it came about, and I cannot pretend to explain it, there was no doubt that Willie Hughes suddenly became to me a mere myth, an idle dream, the boyish fancy of a young man who, like most ardent spirits, was more anxious to convince others than to be himself convinced. 

The basis of every scandal is an immoral certainty, 

I wish I had, for as sure as there is a God in heaven, if he ever does you any wrong, I shall kill him. 

It is only the sacred things that are worth touching. 

The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. 

youth is the one thing worth having. 

You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. 

Why should there be one law for men, and another for women? 

He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or 

Leave us some unreality. Do not make us too offensively sane. 

Not that I love thy children, whose dull eyes see nothing save their own unlovely woe, Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know… 

To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them. 

Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. 

The vulgar directness of the question called for a direct answer. 

He wants to enslave you.I shudder at the thought of being free. 

I do’ regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience. 

Nowadays we are all of us so hard up that the only pleasant things to pay are compliments. They”re the only things we can pay. 

The honest ratepayer and his healthy family have no doubt often mocked at the dome-like forehead of the philosopher, and laughed over the strange perspective of the landscape that lies beneath him. If they really knew who he was, they would tremble. For Chuang Tsu spent his life in preaching the great creed of Inaction, and in pointing out the uselessness of all things. 

My dear fellow, the truth is’ quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl. What extraordinary ideas you have about the way to behave to a woman! 

Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who ca’ get into it do that. 

I have put my genius into my life; all I’ve put into my works is my talent. 

I played with an idea, and grew willful; tossed it into the air; transformed it; let it escaped and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox. 

In all pointed sentences some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness. 

America has been discovered before, but it has always been hushed up. 

The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster. 

The English public, as a mass, takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral. 

The suspense is terrible, I hope it will last. 

EXPERT: An ordinary man away from home giving advice. 

The liar at any rate recognizes that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilised being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company. 

The condition of perfection is idleness; the aim of perfection is youth. 

I was disappointed in Niagara -most people must be disappointed in Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life. 

While one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal. The first is personality, which no one should copy; the second is perfection, which all should aim at. 

In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilisation. 

There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate – not to the artist but to the public…. 

The American father… is never seen in London. He passes his life entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by means of a telegram in cipher. 

What is said of a man is nothing. The point is, who says it. 

The Bostonians take their learning too sadly: culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. 

Where there is no exaggeration there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding. It is only about things that do not interest one, that one can give a really unbiased opinion… 

He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time. 

Absolute catholicity of taste is not without its dangers. It is only an auctioneer who should admire all schools of art. 

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attraction of others. 

I know not whether Laws be right Or whether Laws be wrong; All that we know who live in gaol Is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, A year whose days are long. 

Pleasure is the only thing to live for. Nothing ages like happiness. 

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live; it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at uniformity of type. 

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. 

A sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing. 

All costumes are caricatures. The basis of Art is not the Fancy Ball. 

The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for 300 years. 

The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happy married life. 

Health – silliest word in our language, and one knows well the popular idea of health the English country gentleman galloping after a fox – the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable. 

To many, no doubt, he will seem to be somewhat blatant and bumptious, but we prefer to regard him as being simply British. 

It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat. 

I know, of course, how important it is not to keep a business engagement, if one wants to retain any sense of the beauty of life. 

Either that wallpaper goes, or I do. 

The mere mechanical technique of acting can be taught, but the spirit that is to give life to lifeless forms must be born in a man. No dramatic college can teach its pupils to think or to feel. 

No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists. 

The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. 

Whatever harsh criticisms may be passed on the construction of her sentences, she at least possesses that one touch of vulgarity that makes the whole world kin. 

If they have not opened the eyes of the blind, they have at least given great encouragement to the short-sighted, and while their leaders may have all the inexperience of old age, their young men are far too wise to be ever sensible. 

A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralises is invariably plain. 

I should be like a lion in a cave of savage Daniels. 

Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways. 

In this world there are two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst. 

Life! Life! Don’t let us go to life for our fulfillment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament. 

Newspapers… give us the bald, sordid, disgusting facts of life. They chronicle, with degrading avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details… 

The mere existence of conscience, that faculty of which people prate so much nowadays, and are so ignorantly proud, is a sign of our imperfect development. It must be merged in instinct before we become fine. 

Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out. 

It requires one to assume such indecent postures. 

Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. 

No, Ernest, don’t talk about action. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream. 

Life is too important to be taken seriously. 

I seem to have heard that observation before…. It has all the vitality of error and all the tediousness of an old friend. 

Men of thought should have nothing to do with action. 

Formerly we used to canonise our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarise them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable. 

A damsel is a genius in the daytime and a beauty at night. 

What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race. 

It is well for our vanity that we slay the criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we had gained by his crime. 

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One exhausts what they have to say in a very short time, and then they become as tedious as one’s relations. 

Ah, every day dear Herbert becomes de plus en plus Oscarie. It is wonderful case of nature imitating art. 

The nineteenth century is a turning point in history, simply on account of the work of two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of Nature, the other the critic of the books of God. 

The worst vice of a fanatic is his sincerity. 

Caricature is the tribute that mediocrity pays to genius. 

Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to you. Find an expression for joy, and you will intensify its ecstasy. 

Every effort that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity. 

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, the world would have been different. 

He hasn’t a single redeeming vice. 

Fashion is the method by which the fantastic becomes for a moment universal. 

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act according with the dictates of reason. 

Men always want to be a woman’s first love. Women have a more subtle instinct: What they like is to be a man’s last romance. 

Nothing is good in moderation. You cannot know good in anything until you have torn the heart out of it by excess. 

I don’t want money. It is only people who pay their bills who want that, and I never pay mine. 

One can only give an unbiased opinion about things that do not interest one, which is no doubt the reason an unbiased opinion is always valueless. The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing. 

Nothing is impossible in Russia but reform. 

The only thing one can do with good advice is pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself. 

Real beauty ends where an intellectual expression begins. 

She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. 

A true gentleman is one who is never unintentionally rude. 

Beauty is a form of genius – is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon. 

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again. 

Good taste is the excuse I have given for leading such a bad life. 

Cecil Graham: What is a cynic? Lord Darlington: A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. 

What between the duties expected of one during one’s lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one’s death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up. 

There is nothing in the whole world so unbecoming to a woman as a Nonconformist conscience. 

When people talk to me about the weather, I always feel they mean something else. 

When I was young I used to think that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old, I know it is. 

With an evening coat and a white tie, anybody, even a stock broker, can gain a reputation for being civilized. 

Vulgarity is the conduct of other people, just as falsehoods are the truths of other people. 

Dear Frank, we believe you; you have dined in every house in London – once. 

The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence. 

I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing. 

London is full of women who trust their husbands. One can always recognise them. They look so thoroughly unhappy. 

How clever you are, my dear! You never mean a single word you say. 

The Americans are certainly hero-worshippers, and always take their heroes from the criminal classes. 

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for. 

When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy. 

There is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that. 

What a fuss people make about fidelity! Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say. 

People who love only once in their lives are shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect – simply a confession of failures. 

The longer I live the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. 

Nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman. 

One should never make one’s debut with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one’s old age. 

She tried to found a salon, and only succeeded in opening a restaurant. 

His work was that curious mixture of bad painting and good intentions that always entitles a man to be called a representative British artist. 

Civilisation is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. 

I love London society! I think it has immensely improved. It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what Society should be. 

The worst form of tyranny the world has ever known the tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts. 

You should study the Peerage, Gerald. It is the one book a young man about town should know thoroughly, and it is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done. 

The fact is, you have fallen lately, Cecily, into a bad habit of thinking for yourself. You should give it up. It is not quite womanly…. Men don’t like it. 

The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope. When the Verities become acrobats we can judge them. 

One can survive anything these days, except death, and live down anything except a good reputation. 

Oh, duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does oneself. 

A man who can dominate a London dinner table can dominate the world. The future belongs to the dandy. It is the exquisites who are going to rule. 

A kiss may ruin a human life. 

By persistently remaining single, a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation. Men should be more careful. 

Must we really see Chicago in order to be educated? 

Ah well, I suppose I shall have to die beyond my means. 

The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analysed, women… merely adored. 

Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither. 

In his very rejection of art Walt Whitman is an artist. He tried to produce a certain effect by certain means and he succeeded…. He stands apart, and the chief value of his work is in its prophecy, not in its performance. 

The Governor was strong upon The Regulations Act: The Doctor said that Death was but A scientific fact: And twice a day the Chaplain called, And left a little tract. 

Grief has turned her fair. 

Popularity is the only insult that has not yet been offered to Mr. Whistler. 

An excellent man! He hasn’t an enemy in the world, and none of his friends like him. 

There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. 

He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigram on his tombstone. 

The gods bestowed on Max the gift of perpetual old age. 

And now, I am dying beyond my means. 

And yet, and yet, These Christs that die upon the barricades, God knows it I am with them, in some ways. 

CECILY. When I see a spade I call it a spade. GWENDOLEN. I am glad to say I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different. 

Charity, dear Miss Prism, charity! None of us are perfect. I myself am peculiarly susceptible to draughts. 

It is an odd thing, but every one who disappears is said to be in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world. 

She is absolutely inadmissible into society. Many a woman has a past, but I am told that she has at least a dozen, and that they all fit. 

We become lovers when we see Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet makes us students. The blood of Duncan is upon our hands, with Timon we rage against the world, and when Lear wanders out upon the heath the terror of madness touches us. 

It is grossly selfish to require of one’s neighbour that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will probably think differently. If he cannot think, it is monstrous to require thought of any kind. 

Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime. 

In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people…. The Japanese people are… simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art. 

Through our sunless lanes creeps Poverty with her hungry eyes, and Sin with his sodden face follows close behind her. Misery wakes us in the morning and Shame sits with us at night. 

Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but molds it to its purpose. 

It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn’t a dentist. It produced a false impression. 

Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned…. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on. 

The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one’s clean linen in public. 

Lady Bracknell. Good afternoon, dear Algernon, I hope you are behaving very well. Algernon. I’m feeling very well, Aunt Augusta. Lady Bracknell. That’s not quite the same thing. In fact the two things rarely go together. 

I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china. 

Miss Prism: … And you do not seem to reealize, dear Doctor, that by persistently remaining single, a man coverts himself into a permanent public temptation. … Chausuble: But is a man not equally attractive when married? Miss Prism: No married man is ever attractive except to his wife. Chausuble: And often, I’ve been told, not even to her. 

There is nothing that art cannot express. 

Do you know that I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world? Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance. 

I think life too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and fast rules. 

Nothing should be out of the reach of hope. Life is a hope. 

No woman should have a memory. Memory in a woman is the beginning of dowdiness. One can always tell from a woman’s bonnet whether she has got a memory or not. 

Only love can keep anyone alive… 

You know I have loved him always. But we are very poor. Who, being loved, is poor? Oh, no one. I hate my riches. They are a burden… 

I have no objection to anyone’s sex life as long as they don’t practice it in the street and frighten the horses. 

If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture… 

A grapefruit is just a lemon that saw an opportunity and took advantage of it. 

Women treat us [men] like humanity treats gods – they worship us and keep bothering us to do something. 

What is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere? 

There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not. 

Why is it that at a bachelor’s establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne. 

The study of law is sublime, and its practice vulgar. 

Be moderate in all things, including moderation. 

Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others. 

The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable. 

Requiescat Tread lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow. All her bright golden hair Tarnished with rust, She that was young and fair Fallen to dust. Lily-like, white as snow, She hardly knew She was a woman, so Sweetly she grew. Coffin-board, heavy stone, Lie on her breast, I vex my heart alone She is at rest. Peace, Peace, she cannot hear Lyre or sonnet, All my life’s buried here, Heap earth upon it. 

I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying. 

Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result. 

Nature constantly imitates art. 

Consistency is the hallmark of the unimaginative. 

Everyone may not be good, but there’s always something good in everyone. Never judge anyone shortly because every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. 

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. We all have clouds above us but some see their silver linings. We all face difficulties but some of us are grateful that they aren’t worse. 

True love is just like regular love, but with more truth. 

One should absorb the color of life. 

I can resist anything but temptation. 

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken. 

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much. 

The pen is mightier than the paving-stone 

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

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all