Women are not meant to judge us, but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is their mission.

I’ve now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest

Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that

The very essence of romance is uncertainty

Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval. When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.

Lord Henry went out to the garden and found Dorian Gray burying his face in the great cool lilac-blossoms, feverishly drinking in their perfume as if it had been wine. He came close to him and put his hand upon his shoulder. ‘You are quite right to do that,’ he murmured. ‘Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul

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

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

You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages. With an evening coat and a white tie, as you told me once, anybody, even a stock-broker, can gain a reputation for being civilized.

One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar

Ah! the strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. […] Science can never grapple with the irrational

I delight in talking politics. I talk them all day long. But I can’t bear listening to them.

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

My dear father, only people who look dull ever get into the House of Commons, and only people who are dull ever succeed there

Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is

All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive

We have all feet of clay, women as well as men; but when we men love women, we love them knowing their weaknesses, their follies, their imperfections, love them all the more, it may be, for that reason

Ah, nowadays people marry as often as they can, don’t they? It is most fashionable

Oh, damn sympathy. There is a great deal too much of that sort of thing going on nowadays

I would to God that I had been able to tell the truth to live the truth. Ah! that is the great thing in life, to live the truth

How you women war against each other

Ah, I forgot, your husband is an exception. Mine is the general rule, and nothing ages a woman so rapidly as having married the general rule.

What seem to us a bitter trials are often blessings in disguise

I do not know whether there is anything peculiarly exciting in the air of this particular part of Hertfordshire, but the number of engagements that go on seems to me considerably above the proper average that statistics have laid down for our guidance

You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter – a girl brought up with the utmost care – to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel?

Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.

And you do not seem to realize, dear Doctor, that by persistently remaining single, a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation. Men should be more careful; this very celibacy leads weaker vessels astray

I never change, except in my affections.

To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution

Long engagements give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage, which is never advisable

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

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

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

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility

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

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his

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

In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing

I really don’t see what is so romantic about proposing. One may be accepted – one usually is, I believe – and then the excitement is ended. The very essence of romance is uncertainty.

If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.

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

The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.

Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one’s age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality

Life has everything in store for you, Dorian. There is nothing that you, with your extraordinary good looks, will not be able to do

Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book. There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.

The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable. There were passions in him that would find their terrible outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of their evil real

Then the curtain rises, and you will see the girl to whom I am going to give all my life, to whom I have given everything that is good in me

To be good is to be in harmony with one’s self

Yes, we are overcharged for everything nowadays. I should fancy that the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich

How much that strange confession explained to him! The painter’s absurd fits of jealousy, his wild devotion, his extravagant panegyrics, his curious reticences — he understood them all now, and he felt sorry. There seemed to him to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance.

I make a great difference between people. I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me. Is that very vain of me? I think it is rather vain

He was prisoned in thought. Memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away

Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil,’ cried Dorian with a wild gesture of despair

Sibyl? Oh, she was so shy and so gentle. There is something of a child about her. Her eyes opened wide in exquisite wonder when I told her what I thought of her performance, and she seemed quite unconscious of her power.

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

It was his beauty that had ruined him, his beauty and the youth that he had prayed for. But for those two things, his life might have been free from stain. His beauty had been to him but a mask, his youth but a mockery. What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts. Why had he worn its livery? Youth had spoiled him

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.

We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.

I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream — I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal — to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be

If I had read all this in a book, Harry, I think I would have wept over it. Somehow, now that it has happened actually, and to me, it seems far too wonderful for tears.

I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day — mock me horribly

Ah! 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. . . . A new Hedonism — that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol

People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial. That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

And beauty is a form of genius — is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it. You smile? Ah! when you have lost it you won’t smile

Yes, he was certainly wonderfully handsome, with his finely curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair. There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth’s passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world. No wonder Basil Hallward worshipped him.

You know how a voice can stir one. Your voice and the voice of Sibyl Vane are two things that I shall never forget. When I close my eyes, I hear them, and each of them says something different. I don’t know which to follow