Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.
You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life.MRS ALLONBY: And the body is born young and grows old. That is life’s tragedy.
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.
The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything.Yes, murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; and when they grow older they know it.
If you don’t get everything you want, think of the things you don’t get that you don’t want.
I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.
One should always be in love. That’s the reason one should never marry.
There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
Men always want to be a woman’s first love – women like to be a man’s last romance.
Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.
To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.
I really don’t see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I’ll certainly try to forget the fact.
Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.
When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy.
Oh, brothers! I don’t care for brothers. My elder brother won’t die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.
Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.
I really don’t see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I’ll certainly try to forget the fact.
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for.
I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when one loses one’s good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.
I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life.
I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful
RequiescatTread lightly, she is nearUnder the snow,Speak gently, she can hearThe daisies grow.All her bright golden hairTarnished with rust,She that was young and fairFallen to dust.Lily-like, white as snow,She hardly knewShe was a woman, soSweetly she grew.Coffin-board, heavy stone,Lie on her breast,I vex my heart aloneShe is at rest.Peace, Peace, she cannot hearLyre or sonnet,All my life’s buried here,Heap earth upon it.
My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.
Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.
Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.
It is perfectly monstrous,’ he said, at last, ‘the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one’s back that are absolutely and entirely true.
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.
Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, a possession for all eternity.
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
For he who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die.