"The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for."

"And the young Fisherman said to himself: "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."

"With slouch and swing around the ringWe trod the Fools' Parade!We did not care: we knew we wereThe Devils' Own Brigade:And shaven head and feet of leadMake a merry masquerade."

"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."

"Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit."

"Men become old but they never become good."

"Niagara ... is the first disappointment in the married life of many Americans who spend their honeymoon there."

"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."

"For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses."

"The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork."

"At every single moment of one's life one is going to be no less than what one has been."

"Men know life too early women know life too late."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"Why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself?"

"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."

"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."

"When good Americans die they go to Paris."

"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."

"Life has always poppies in her hands."

"But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms."

"To get into the best society nowadays one has either to feed people amuse people or shock people."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"Nichts Interessantes ist jemals richtig."

"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."

"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."

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

"Journalism justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarist."

"It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in suchan inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, theirabsolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lackof style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give usan impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that.Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements ofbeauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, thewhole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenlywe find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of theplay. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonderof the spectacle enthralls us."

"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 truth is rarely pure and never simple."

"The heart was made to be broken."

"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."

"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 an other 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 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?"

"Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success."

"Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul?"

"Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions."

"Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?I didn't think it polite to listen, sir."

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

"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."

"If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first."

"For he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die."

"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."

"It is simply expression, as Henry says, that gives reality to things."

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