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

"Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life."

"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."

"Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal."

"She lives the poetry she cannot write."

"The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention."

"Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness."

"Deliver me from my disciples!"

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

"Yet the roses are not less lovely for all that."

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

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

"A true gentlemen is one who is never unintentionally rude."

"There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them. There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature."

"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."

"A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent."

"Ambition is the last refuge of the failure."

"Ordinary women never appeal to one's imagination.They are limited to their century. No glamour every transfigures them. One knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets. One can always find them. There is no mystery in any of them."

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

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

"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."

"This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again."

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

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

"One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing."

"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."

"Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself."

"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power."

"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."

"Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting."

"Moral grounds are always the last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty."

"Oh, I can't explain. 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 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 daresay, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one's life."

"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."

"All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction."

"But neither milk-white rose nor red May bloom in prison air;The shard, the pebble, and the flint, Are what they give us there:For flowers have been known to heal A common man's despair."

"What fire does not destroy, it hardens."

"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 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."

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

"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. You lost life's secret."

"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."

"All I want now is to look at life."

"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?"