The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet’s dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.
The English country gentleman galloping after the fox – the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.
I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent engagement.
He hadn’t a single redeeming vice.
Pleasures may turn a heart to stone, riches may make it callous, but sorrows cannot break it. Hearts live by being wounded.
He is some brainless, beautiful creature, who should always be here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in the summer when we want something to chill our intelligence.
For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.
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.