"The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination,made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks."

"I don't want to earn a living, I want to live."

"No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone."

"It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection."

"Women have no appreciation of good looks-at least, good women have not."

"When a love comes to an end weaklings cry efficient ones instantly find another love and the wise already have one in reserve."

"But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality."

"Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong."

"Well I won't argue about the matter. You always want to argue about things.That is exactly what things were originally made for."

"The doctors found out that Bunbury could not live, that is what I mean - so Bunbury died.He seems to have had great confidence in the opinion of his physicians. I am glad, however, that he made up his mind at the last to some definite course of action, and acted under proper medical advice."

"You don't seem to realise, that in married life three is company and two is none."

"The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties."

"If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want."

"Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us."

"If one plays good music, people don't listen and if one plays bad music people don't talk."

"Well, I don't like your clothes. You look perfectly ridiculous in them. Why on earth don't you go up and change? It's perfectly childish to be in mourning for a man who is actually staying a whole week with you in your house as a guest. I call it grotesque."

"A lily-girl, not made for this world's pain."

"Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about."

"Anybody can have common sense, povided that they have no imagination."

"It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating."

"A strange sense of loss came over him. He felt that Dorian Gray would never again be to him all that he had been in the past. Life had come between them.... His eyes darkened, and the crowded, flaring streets became blurred to his eyes. When the cab drew up at the theatre, it seemed to him that he had grown years older."

"Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world."

"So with curious eyes and sick surmiseWe watched him day by day,And wondered if each one of usWould end the self-same way,For none can tell to what red HellHis sightless soul may stray."

"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."

"I have a business appointment that I am anxious... to miss."

"I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever."

"Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable."

"He is fairer than the morning star, and whiter than the moon. For his body I would give my soul, and for his love I would surrender heaven."

"Life at times loses its sense of reality; it appears to us like a weird, optical illusion - a phantasmagoric bubble that will disappear at the slightest breath."

"What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise."

"For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful to us."

"Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities."

"How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive."

"An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them."

"I have no objection to anyone's sex life as long as they don't practice it in the street and frighten the horses."

"A book or poem which has no pity in it had better not be written."

"Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole."

"Every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character."

"Bronze-limbed and well-knit, like a statue wrought by a Grecian, he stood on the sand with his back to the moon, and out of the foam came white arms that beckoned to him, and out of the waves rose dim forms that did him homage. Before him lay his shadow, which was the body of his Soul, and behind him hung the moon in the honey-coloured air."

"I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world."

"The post on her left was occupied by Mr. Erskine of Treadley, an old gentleman of considerable charm and culture, who had fallen, however, into bad habits of silence, having, as he explained once to Lady Agatha, said everything that he had to say before he was thirty."

"Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing."

"I can resist everything except temptation."

"I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly."

"No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly."

"The best way to make children good is to make them happy."

"I don't want to see him alone. He says things that annoy me. He gives me good advice."

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

"Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval."

"The world loves the Saint, and Christ loves the sinner."