“I worshipped you too much. I am punished for it. You worshipped yourself too much. We are both punished.” 

“Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” 

“He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression...” 

“The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for. People people have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to oneself.” 

“People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern us. And yet—” 

“You might see nothing in him. I see everything in him.” 

“Not "Forgive us for our sins" but "Smite us for our iniquities" should be the prayer of man to a most just God.” 

“To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.” 

“She lives in the poetry she cannot write.” 

“I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.” 

“All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.” 

“No theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself” 

“anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often,” 

“Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one,” 

“There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses.” 

“What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace. they would defile it, and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It would be always alive. (Dorian Gray regarding his portrait)” 

“The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.” 

“I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one's life.” 

Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

Everything popular is wrong.

To become a spectator of one’s own life is to escape the suffering of life.