Just because a man has died for it, does not make it true.
I analyzed you, though you did not adore me.
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.
To shut one’s eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice.
Oh, I don’t care about Jack. I don’t care for anybody in the whole world but you. I love you, Cecily. You will marry me, won’t you? You silly boy! Of course. Why, we have been engaged for the last three months. For the last three months?
His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion.
When he takes the knife to the canvass the servants find him lying dead with a knife through is heart and “withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage.” and the portrait “in all the wonders of his exquisite youth and beauty.” p 349.
Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects.
It’s the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.
It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees. It makes life too full of terrors.
If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners, she doesn’t deserve to have any.
The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.
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.