"It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone."

"They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance."

"Irony is wasted on the stupid."

"To become a work of art is the object of living."

"It is rarely in the world's history that its ideal has been one of joy and beauty. The worship of pain has far more often dominated the world."

"Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance."

"The curves of your lips rewrite history."

"There's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It's a thing no married man knows anything about."

"Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance."

"I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies."

"A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure."

"The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it... I can resist everything but temptation."

"Perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to play a part."

"Ugh!' snarled the Wolf, as he limped through the brushwood with his tail between his legs, 'this is perfectly monstrous weather. Why doesn't the Government look to it?"

"Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."

"He wants to enslave you.''I shudder at the thought of being free."

"America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up."

"I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn't write them down, I should not probably forget all about them."

"It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it."

"A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature."

"Woman begins by resisting a man's advances and ends by blocking his retreat."

"The only horrible thing in the world is ennui."

"The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream."

"The only people to whose opinions I listen now with any respect are people much younger than myself. They seem in front of me. Life has revealed to them her latest wonder."

"A man's life is of more value than a woman's. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. Our lives revolve in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man's life progresses. I have just learnt this, and much else with it, from Lord Goring. And I will not spoil your life for you, nor see you spoil it as a sacrifice to me, a useless sacrifice."

"The worst of it is that I am perpetually being punished for nothing; this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me. It's perfectly awful to let the mind grind itself away between the upper and nether millstones of regret and remorse without respite; with books my life would be livable -- any life."

"It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information."

"Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious."

"I left her in the forest of Arden, I shall find her in an orchard in Verona."

"Something was dead in each of us,and what was dead was hope."

"Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour."

"The very essence of romance is uncertainty."

"Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic."

"From the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul brain and power."

"It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him."

"How sad it is!" murmured Dorian Gray with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. "How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June" . If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that-for that-I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!"

"I won't tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world's voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. You have that moment now. Choose!"

"An excellent man he has no enemies and none of his friends like him."

"I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience."

"Plain women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women never are. They are always so occupied with being jealous of other women's husbands."

"It is very wrong to kill any one[.]""Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!"

"To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."

"Marco Polo had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-colored pearls in the mouths of the dead. A sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that the diver brought to King Perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned for seven moons over its loss."

"The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude."

"Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects."

"The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square."

"Inteligence lives longer than beauty."

"In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants and the other is getting it."

"The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man's intelligence."

"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."