What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb. American novels, answered Lord Henry.
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
The very essence of romance is uncertainty.
Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.
Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.
Fashion: by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment the universal.
To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life.
Whenever life sucks, remember you’re going to die someday.
Love is like a war; easy to start but hard to end and you never know where it might take you.
Genius is born-not paid.
At every single moment of one’s life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.
Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.
As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.
To look wise is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier.
Daughter of Sodom, come not near me! But cover thy face with a veil, and scatter ashes upon thine head, and get thee to the desert and seek out the Son of Man.
Art begins with abstract decoration with purely imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and non existent.
The Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature this is what I am looking for. It is absolutely necessary for me to find it somewhere.
I wish I could love,” cried Dorian Gray with a deep note of pathos in his voice. “But I seem to have lost the passion and forgotten the desire. I am too much concentrated on myself. My own personality has become a burden to me.
Don’t talk about horrid subjects. If one doesn’t talk about a thing, it has never happened.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.