"But somehow, I feel sure that if I lived in the country for six months, I should become so unsophisticated that no one would take the slightest notice of me."

"Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities."

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

"Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic."

"My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go."

"Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things."

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

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go."

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

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

"All I want to do now is look at life. You may come and look at it with me, if you care to."

"You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of color 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."

"He is really not so ugly after all, provided, of course, that one shuts one's eyes, and does not look at him."

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

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

"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."

"After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations."

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

"Pessimist - one who when he has the choice of two evils chooses both."

"Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it."

"You talk books away," he said; "why don't you write one?" "I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal."

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

"The Number our envious Persons, confirmation our capability."

"Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one."

"Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are."

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

"In every pleasure, cruelty has its place..."

"For each man kills the thing he loves yet each man does not diehe does not die a death of shame on a day of dark disgracenor have a noose about his neck, nor a cloth upon his facenor drop feet foremost through the floor into an empty spaceHe does not sit with silent men who watch him night and dayWho watch him when he tries to weep and when he tries to prayWho watch him lest himself should rob the prison of its prey."

"Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life."

"She is a peacock in everything but beauty."

"Illusion is the first of all pleasures."

"Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes."

"It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible not the invisible."

"Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known."

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

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

"Outside the family circle, papa, I'm glad to say, is entirely unknown. I think that is quite as it should be. The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man."

"Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching."

"Always! That is the dreadful word ... it is a meaningless word too."

"Anybody can make history, only a great man can write it."

"You can never be overdressed or overeducated."

"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."

"Because to influence a person is to give one's own soul."

"There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards. The last page is as a rule the most interesting, and when one begins with the catastrophe or the dA©nouement one feels on pleasant terms of equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hair-breadth escapes of the hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved. One knows the jealously guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider it their duty to display."

"Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. World's had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow..."

"There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful."

"My Salome is a mystic the sister SalammbA - a Saint ThA©rA se who worships the moon."

"Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art."

"Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result."