"An egg is always an adventure, it may be different each time."

"It is always painful to part from people whom one has known for a brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity, But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable."

"Be yourself, everyone else is already taken."

"It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words."

"A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."

"You can have your secret as long as I have your heart."

"The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities.... A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true."

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

"To have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact talk to every woman as if you loved her and to every man as if he bored you."

"People are so annoying. All my pianists look exactly like poets, and all my poets look exactly like pianists."

"Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation."

"While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance."

"Lady Windermere: Windermere and I married for love.Duchess of Berwick: Yes, we begin like that. It was only Berwick's brutal and incessant threats of suicide that made me accept him at all, and before the year was out, he was running after all kinds of petticoats, every colour, every shape, every material."

"I quite agree with Dr. Nordau's assertion that all men of genius are insane, but Dr. Nordau forgets that all sane people are idiots."

"It is not the prisoners who need reformation it is the prisons."

"The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means."

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

"Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices."

"Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both."

"Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different."

"The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is."

"Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art."

"I hope, Cecily, I shall not offend you if I state quite frankly and openly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection."

"Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life...I have put only my talent into my works."

"Imagination is a quality that was given to man compensate him from whats not. The sense of humor was given to console him from what is."

"I must confess that most modern mysticism seems to me to be simply a method of imparting useless knowledge in a form that no one can understand."

"The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."

"A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can you want?"

"Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away."

"Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer."

"You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know."

"In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience."

"I don't like compliments and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean."

"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it."

"Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived."

"The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history."

"There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies."

"I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays."

"Life is too important to be taken seriously."

"One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation."

"Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian...I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does. I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes."

"Everything is going to be fine in the end. If it's not fine it's not the end."

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault."

"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."

"How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?"

"I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex."

"Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement."

"We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces."

"There is nothing like race, is there?"

"The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses."