Most of the shadows of this life are caused by our standing in our own sunshine. 

“Every impulse we strangle will only poison us.” 

“Yes, very sensible... People die of common sense, Dorian, one lost moment at a time. Life is a moment. There is no hereafter. So make it burn always with the hardest flame.” 

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.” 

Life is a journey, not a destination

What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour?

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whisper of God.

Men are better than their theology.

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. 

It should never fall into something usual and settled, but should be alert and inventive, and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery.

I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances.

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

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

“I can resist anything except temptation.” 

“The very essence of romance is uncertainty.” 

Can another be so blessed, and we so pure, that we can offer him tenderness? When a man becomes dear to me, I have touched the goal of fortune.

I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness, with which one chemical atom meets another.

The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.

The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes a low business-tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact.

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.

We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.

The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.

In failing circumstances no one can be relied on to keep their integrity.