“Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.” 

“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” 

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” 

“Who, being loved, is poor?” 

“Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.” 

“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.” 

“I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.” 

“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.” 

“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.” 

“I have nothing to declare except my genius.” 

“Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.” 

“A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.” 

“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” 

“Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.” 

“We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.” 

“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.” 

“Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.” 

“No good deed goes unpunished.” 

“After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.” 

“Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.” 

“Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.” 

“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.” 

“I like men who have a future and women who have a past.” 

“To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” 

“The world is a stage and the play is badly cast.” 

“Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.” 

“Every woman is a rebel.” 

“We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.” 

“Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.” 

“I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.” 

“To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.” 

“A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.” 

“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.” 

“Some things are more precious because they don't last long.” 

“Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.” 

“Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.” 

“How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being” 

“If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life.” 

“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.” 

“There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.” 

“Everything in moderation, including moderation.” 

“Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?” 

“The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.” 

“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.” 

“There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.” 

“Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.” 

“We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.” 

“You seem to forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.” 

“I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life.” 

“My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect---simply a confession of failures. Faithfulness! I must analyse it some day. The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up. But I don't want to interrupt you. Go on with your story. ”