"Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it right."

"She lives in the poetry she cannot write."

"The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives."

"The costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life."

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."

"I had a strange feeling that Fate had in store for me exquisite joys and exquisite sorrows."

"The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you."

"Ah! that is the great thing in life, to live the truth."

"Everything popular is wrong."

"What a silly thing love is!' said the student as he walked away. 'It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. In fact, it is quite unpractical, and, as in this age to be practical is everything, I shall go back to philosophy and study metaphysics.' So he returned to his room and pulled out a great dusty book, and began to read."

"I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect."

"The ages live in history through their anachronisms."

"The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass."

"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all."

"I have learned this: it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one becomes as a consequence of it."

"You silly Arthur! If you knew anything about...anything, which you don't, you would know that I adore you. Everyone in London knows it except you. It is a public scandal the way I adore you. I have been going about for the last six months telling the whole of society that I adore you. I wonder you consent to have anything to say to me. I have no character left at all. At least, I feel so happy that I am quite sure I have no character left at all."

"The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose."

"And, certainly to him Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation."

"He would never again tempt innocence. He would be good."

"And Beauty is a form of Genius - is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation."

"To begin with, I dined there on Monday, and once a week is quite enough to dine with one's own relations."

"One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art."

"Things are in their essence what we choose to make them. A thing is according to the mode in which one looks at it."

"I have nothing to declare except my genuis."

"Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves and fibers and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams."

"Nobody is worthy to be loved. The fact that God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy. Or if that phrase seems to be a bitter one to bear, let us say that everybody is worthy of love, except him who thinks he is."

"If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized."

"A true friend stabs you in the front."

"As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."

"It's beauty that captures your attention, personality that captures your heart.."

"Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose."

"Now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day."

"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul."

"People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it's impossible to count them accurately."

"One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be."

"Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead."

"If I could get back my youth, I'd do anything in the world except get up early, take exercise or be respectable."

"To be really mediæval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes."

"What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts."

"The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it."

"There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better."

"Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality."

"I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train."

"The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read."

"You cut life to pieces with your epigrams."

"There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love."

"No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything."

"With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone."

"It is perfectly monstrous,' he said, at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true."

"I know not whether laws be right Or whether laws be wrong All that we know who lie in gaol Is that the wall is strong And that each day is like a year A year whose days are long."