"Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all."

"Failure is only the name that we give to our mistakes."

"Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes."

"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."

"What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.American novels, answered Lord Henry."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"That is the worst of women. They always want one to be good. And if we are good, when they meet us, they don't love us at all. They like to find us quite irretrievably bad, and to leave us quite unattractively good."

"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination."

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."

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

"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."

"Beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins."

"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."

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

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

"Art, like Nature, has her monsters."

"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."

"I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them."

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

"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."

"It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way."

"The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer."

"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."

"If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart."

"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."

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

"Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can't get into it do that."

"I like men who have a future and women who have a past."

"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."

"Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction."

"To become the spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life."

"He repeated her name over and over again. The birds that were singing in the dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her."

"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."

"Wisdom comes with winters."

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

"A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies."

"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."

"My gods dwell in temples made with hands."

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

"Women are made to be loved, not understood."

"Of course married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even of one's worse habits."

"My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite."

"I am very pleased you like my stories. They are studies in prose, put for Romance's sake into fanciful form: meant partly for children, and partly for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy, and who find simplicity in a subtle strangeness."

"Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes."

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

"Those whom the gods love grow young."

"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."