It is not length of life, but depth of life.

Life consists of what man is thinking about all day.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

Good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed.

The Gods we worship write their names on our faces; be sure of that.

“Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.” 

“Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.” 

“we always misunderstood ourselves, and rarely understood others” 

“You, who know all the secrets of life, tell me how to charm Sibyl Vane to love me! I want to make Romeo jealous, I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.” 

“I am not laughing, Dorian; at least I am not laughing at you. But you should not say the greatest romance of your life. You should say the first romance of your life. You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do. That is the one use of the idle classes of a country. Don't be afraid. There are exquisite things in store for you. This is merely the beginning. ” 

“It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. ” 

“We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.” 

“There was purification in punishment. Not 'Forgive us our sins,' but 'Smite us for our iniquities' should be the prayer of a man to a most just God.” 

“I will not bare my soul to their shallow prying eyes. My heart shall never be put under their microscope.” 

“I know he likes me. Of course I flatter him dreadfully. I find a strange pleasure in saying things to him that I know I shall be sorry for having said...Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to someone 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.” 

“The bright dawn flooded the room, and swept the fantastic shadows into dusky corners, where they lay shuddering.” 

“Many people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honor.” 

“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.” 

“But what world says that [I'm wicked]? It can only be the next world. This world and I are on excellent terms.” 

“you will always love, and you will always be loved” 

“When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.” 

“Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.” 

“Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.” 

“It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.” 

When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish.

A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will come out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping, we are becoming.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven. 

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.

Do not say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders, so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.

Stay at home in your mind. Don’t recite other people’s opinions.

“One of the great secrets of life. Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense and discover too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.” 

“I am afraid that woman appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters, all the same. They love being dominated.” 

“because to influence a person is to give one's own soul.” 

“You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of color in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play. I tell you Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.” 

“Even things that are true can be proved.” 

“What a fuss people make about fidelity!" exclaimed Lord Henry. "Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.” 

“You are a sceptic." "Never! Scepticism is the beginning of faith." "What are you?" "To define is to limit.” 

“I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die.” 

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

“Yes,’ he cried, ‘you have killed my love! You used to stir my imagination. Now you don’t even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid. My God! how mad I was to love you! What a fool I have been! You are nothing to me now. I will never see you again. I will never think of you. I will never mention your name. You can’t know what you were to me, once. Why, once… Oh, I can’t bear to think of it! I wish I had never laid eyes upon you! You have spoiled the romance of my life. How little you can know of love if you say it mars your art! Without your art you are nothing. I would have made you famous, splendid, magnificent. The world would have worshiped you, and you would have borne my name. What are you now? A third-rate actress with a pretty face.” 

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; Unbelief, in denying them.

Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely… but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude.

The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself and whatever science or art or course of action he engages in reacts upon and illuminates the recesses of his own mind.

The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence.