She knew nothing but she had everything he had lost.
If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.
The weather still continues charming.
I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
Conscience makes egotists of us all.
I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose.
I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won’t argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.
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?
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.
We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes...
We have quite the same ideas. No; I think our ideas are quite different. But he has been most pleasant.
It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.
Thin-lipped wisdom spoke at her from the worn chair, hinted at prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose author apes the name of common sense.
Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval.
Prism! Where is that baby?
There was purification in punishment. Not ‘Forgive us our sins,’ but ‘Smite us for our iniquities’ should be the prayer of a man to a most just God.
For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.
Sometime you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such thing as romantic experience; there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance- that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long someday to feel.
It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.
In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.