"When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her."

"There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that--perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims...."

"Realize your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing."

"Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them."

"Lady Bracknell, I hate to seem inquisitive, but would you kindly inform me who I am?"

"One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry."

"It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain.It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also."

"Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one's own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as if it had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own."

"But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face."

"I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question - simple curiosity."

"One knows so well the popular idea of health: the English country gentleman galloping after a fox - the unspeakable in full pursuit of the unbeatable."

"When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is."

"Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty."

"It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. I discern great sanity in the Greek attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on the grass were really mauve or not. But they saw that the sea was for the swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the runner. They loved the trees for the shadow that they cast, and the forest for its silence at noon."

"To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable."

"High hopes were once formed of democracy, but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people."

"Even things that are true can be proved."

"We all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man - that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value."

"Time is a waste of money."

"Hearts Live By Being Wounded."

"A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on."

"You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do."

"Nothing spoils romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman."

"My life-my whole life- take it, and do with it what you will. I love you-love you as I have never loved any living thing. From the moment I met you I loved you, loved you blindly, adoringly,madly!You didn't know it then-you know it now."

"I'm a man of simple tastes. I'm always satisfied with the best."

"A flower blossoms for its own joy."

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."

"I have forgotten all about my school days. I have a vague impression that they were detestable."

"The salesman knows nothing of what he is selling save that he is charging a great deal too much for it."

"I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much."

"I can write no stately proemAs a prelude to my lay;From a poet to a poemI would dare to say.For if of these fallen petalsOne to you seem fair,Love will waft it till it settlesOn your hair.And when wind and winter hardenAll the loveless land,It will whisper of the garden,You will understand."

"And after the second year was over, the Soul said to the young Fisherman at night-time, and as he sat in the wattled house alone, "Lo! now I have tempted thee with evil, and I have tempted thee with good, and thy love is stronger than I am. Wherefore will I tempt thee no longer, but I pray thee to suffer me to enter thy heart, that I may be with thee even as before.""Surely thou mayest enter," said the young Fisherman, "for in the days when with no heart thou didst go through the world thou must have suffered.""Alas!" cried his Soul, "I can find no place of entrance, so compassed about with love is this heart of thine."

"The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?"

"Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious."

"I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am so afraid he will look just like every one else."

"The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace."

"Hatred is blind, as well as love."

"Ah! Happy they whose hearts can break. And peace of pardon win! How else may man make straight his path. And cleanse his soul from sin? How else but through a broken heart. May the Lord Christ enter in?"

"It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes."

"A man cannot be too careful in his choice of enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me."

"Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays."

"There is luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has the right to blame us."

"No man is rich enough to buy back his past."

"It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world."

"You are not listening to a word I am saying . . . and I am making the most delightful plans for your future."

"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."

"A man who does not think for himself does not think at all."

"That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people would want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste."

"Who, being loved, is poor?"

"The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."