Everything in nature contains all the power of nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

The ancient precept, “Know thyself”, and the modern precept, “Study nature”, become at last one maxim.

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown.

Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection.

Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing.

The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food.

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.” 

“I should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.” 

“He wants to enslave you.'

'I shudder at the thought of being free.” 

“If one were to live his life fully and completely were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream.” 

“How sad it is!" murmured Dorian Gray with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. "How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June… . If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!” 

“Women treat us [men] like humanity treats gods – they worship us and keep bothering us to do something.” 

“Society, civilized society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef.” 

“Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval.” 

These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.

Every sunset brings the promise of a new dawn.

The world globes itself in a drop of dew.

Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things.

It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men. 

The power of Nature predominates over the human will in all works of even the fine arts, in all that respects their material and external circumstances. Nature paints the best part of the picture, carves the best part of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and speaks the best part of the oration.

The greatest wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

“You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.” 

“But a chance tone of colour 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.” 

“There seemed to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance.” 

“Basil my dear boy puts everything that is charming in him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices his principles and his common sense. The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet a really great poet is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.” 

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.” 

“the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.” 

“Those who go beneath the surface, do so at their peril.” 

“What nonsense people talk about happy marriages!" exclaimed Lord Henry. " A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.” 

“One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.” 

“Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.” 

“What are you?" "To define is to limit.” 

“It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time. Perhaps, as Harry says, a really grande passion is the privilege of those who have nothing to do, and that is the use of the idle classes in a country” 

“What you have told me is quite a romance, a romance of art one might call it, and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.” 

“You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. I worshipped you. I grew jealous of every one to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself.” 

“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.” 

“The longer I live, Dorian, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. In art, as in politics, les grand-pères ont toujours tort.” 

“Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.” 

“The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination,

made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks.” 

“She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.” 

The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce.