A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.
A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
A good friend will always stab you in the front.
A kiss may ruin a human life
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.
A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.
A passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young.
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.
All art is quite useless.
All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
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.
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.
Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.
Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.
Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
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.
Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.
Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.
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.
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.
Each man kills the thing he loves.
Each of us has heaven and hell in him...
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 portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
Every woman is a rebel.
Everything in moderation, including moderation.
Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.
Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
For one moment our lives met, our souls touched.
He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.
Hear no evil, speak no evil, and you won't be invited to cocktail parties.
Hearts are made to be broken.
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
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.
I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.
I am not young enough to know everything.
I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.
I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be somebody else.
I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.
I beg your pardon I didn't recognise you - I've changed a lot.
I can resist anything except temptation.
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.
I could deny it if I liked. I could deny anything if I liked.
I don't say we all ought to misbehave. But we ought to look as if we could
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 don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.
I drink to separate my body from my soul.
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 have learned this: it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one becomes as a consequence of it.
I have nothing to declare except my genius.
I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.
I like men who have a future and women who have a past.
I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.
I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do - the day after.
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.
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.
If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life.
If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.
If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.
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.
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)
Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do.
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.
It takes great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it.
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.
Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.
Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is by far the best ending for one.
Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.
Life is too short to learn German
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.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
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.
Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.
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!
Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.
Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.
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.
Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.
One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.
One should always be a little improbable.
One should always be in love. That's the reason one should never marry.
One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.
Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
Only the shallow know themselves
Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
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.
She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.
Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.
Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
Some things are more precious because they don't last long.
The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
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.
The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.
The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously-and have somebody find out.
The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.
The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.
The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.
The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
The very essence of romance is uncertainty.
The world is a stage and the play is badly cast.
The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.
The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork.
There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
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.
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
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.
There is no sin except stupidity.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
They've promised that dreams can come true - but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.
This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go.
Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.
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.
To be popular one must be a mediocrity.
To define is to limit.
To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.
We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.
What of Art?
What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise
When good Americans die, they go to Paris'.
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.
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.
Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.
Who, being loved, is poor?
With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?
Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.
Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.
Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.
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?
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.
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.
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
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
You can never be overdressed or overeducated.
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.
You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.
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?
You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.
