“Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.” 

“Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. 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.” 

“She is a peacock in everything but beauty!” 

“But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.” 

“The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for. 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.” 

“People say sometimes that Beauty is superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” 

“It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words.” 

“She knew nothing but she had everything he had lost.” 

“I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.” 

“I didn't say I liked it Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.” 

“In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all. ” 

“I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about it's use. It is hitting below the intellect.” 

“Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions."

"I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.” 

“As for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.” 

“every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.” 

“My dear boy, the people who only love 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.” 

“I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day—mock me horribly!” 

“Genius lasts longer than beauty” 

“You and I will always be friends."

"Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that.” 

“Now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer’s day.” 

“She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy.” 

“I never take any notice to what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.” 

“The only horrible thing in the world is ennui.” 

I do not wish more external goods, — neither possessions, nor honors, nor powers, nor persons. The gain is apparent; the tax is certain.

Explore, and explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatise yourself, nor accept another’s dogmatism. Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board.

Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread, and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men’s possessions, in all men’s affections, in art, in nature, and in hope.

But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

What your heart thinks is great, is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your reactions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

‘Tis curious that we only believe as deeply as we live.

Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.

“We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.” 

“Conscience makes egotists of us all.” 

“The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. ” 

“A beautiful woman risking everything for a mad passion. A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous, treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man. Yes, it was an interesting background. It posed the lad, made him more perfect as it were. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.” 

“From the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul brain and power.” 

“As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.” 

“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.” 

“An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.” 

“I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.” 

“But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think.” 

There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.

He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

Be not the slave of your own past – plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.

Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting some on yourself.