Something was dead in each of us, and what was dead was hope.
Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to.
To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.
Artists, like the Greek gods, are only revealed to one another.
I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man.
If one doesn’t talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression that gives reality to things.
A man’s very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life.
Nowadays, saying what you really think can be a serious error since one risks being misunderstood.
They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance.
The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died.
Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they’re better.
Love! What is love? It’s nothing. It’s just a word. It doesn’t exist. Only pleasure is important.
A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.
There is a fatality about good resolutions – that they are always made too late.
If we’re always guided by other people’s thoughts, what’s the point in having our own?
Poor? What does that matter? When poverty creeps in at the door, love flies in through the window.
Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.
Ah, on what little things does happiness depend! I have read all that the wise men have written, and all the secrets of philosophy are mine, yet for want of a red rose is my life made wretched.
My dear Arthur, I never talk scandal. I only talk gossip. What is the difference between scandal and gossip? Oh! Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn’t know the market place of any single thing.