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.
Oh, don’t cough, Ernest. When one is dictating one should speak fluently and not cough. Besides, I don’t know how to spell a cough.
The people who have adored me – there have not been very many, but there have been some – have always insisted on living on, long after I had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me.
I didn’t say I liked it Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.
What you really are is a Bunburyist. I was quite right in saying you were a Bunburyist. You are one of the most advanced Bunburyists I know.
Plain women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women never are. They are always so occupied with being jealous of other women’s husbands.
We in the House of Lords are never in touch with public opinion. That makes us a civilised body.
Lord Illingworth told me this morning that there was an orchid there as beautiful as the seven deadly sins.
You shut out from your society the gentle and the good. You laugh at the simple and the pure. living, as you all do, on other and by them, you need at self-sacrifice, and if you throw bread to the poor, it is merely to keep them quiet for a season.
My dear young lady, there was a great deal of truth; I dare say, in what you said, and you looked very pretty while you said it, which is much more important.
But she is happiest alone. She is happiest alone.
I don’t know how to talk. Oh! talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact.
It was you I thought of all the time, I gave to them the love you did not need: lavished on them a love that was not theirs.
Muffins should always be eaten quite calmly, as it is the only way to eat them!