The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse.

    I hate vulgar realism in literature.  The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

    It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting.

    I love acting. It is so much more real than life.

    That strange expression that one sees on the faces of those who are absorbed in a play when some great artist is acting.  There was neither real sorrow in it nor real joy. There was simply the passion of the spectator.

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

    Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

    Now and then a complex personality took the place and assumed the office of art, was indeed, in its way, a real work of art, life having its elaborate masterpieces, just as poetry has, or sculpture, or painting.

    And, certainly, to him life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts.

    He felt a curious delight in the thought that art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.

    It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.

    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.

    There is nothing that art cannot express.

     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.

    Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders.  I don't blame them in the smallest degree. I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.

    All art is quite useless.

    Beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.

    Beauty is a form of genius—is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation.

    To note the curious hard logic of passion, and the emotional coloured life of the intellect—to observe where they met, and where they separated, at what point they were in unison, and at what point they were at discord—there was a delight in that!

    Soul and body, body and soul—how mysterious they were! There was animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality. The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade. Who could say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse began?

    You are the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found. I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue,
or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.

    He sought to elaborate some new scheme of life that would have its reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles, and find in the spiritualizing of the senses its highest realization.

    The only horrible thing in the world is ennui.... That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.

    A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.

    To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise,
get up early, or be respectable.

    One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.

    A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.

    We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

    He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal.

    Don't tell me that you have exhausted life. When a man says that, one knows that life has exhausted him.

    If you really want to console me, teach me rather to forget what has happened, or to see it from a proper artistic point of view.

    It's absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth.  The only people to whose opinions I listen now with any respect are people much younger than myself. They seem in front of me.  Life has revealed to them her latest wonder.

    The harmony of soul and body -- how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two.

    Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about.

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

    It [a new Hedonism] was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment.

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

    Moderation is a fatal thing.  Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast.

    When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.

    The wild desire to live, most terrible of all man's appetites.

    I have never searched for happiness; I have searched for pleasure.

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

    The longer I live, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us.

    The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.

    To be good is to be in harmony with one's self.

    All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime.

    Dorian is far too wise not to do foolish things now and then.

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

    Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination.

    Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

    Oh, she is better than good -- she is beautiful.

    As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested.

    I give the truths of to-morrow.

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

    There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating—people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

    They balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy.

   Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy.  To be popular one must be a mediocrity.

    Ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues.

    Nothing is ever quite true.

    The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

    Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

    The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.

    Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

    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.

    There is a luxury in self-reproach.

    It is personalities, not principles, that move the age.

    There is a fatality about good resolutions—that they are always made too late.

    We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.

    She had marred him for a moment, if he had wounded her for an age.

    One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.

    There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

    Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on.  The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.

    Mysticism, with its marvelous power of making common things strange to us.

     You will soon be going about like the converted, and the revivalist, warning people against all the sins of which you have grown tired.

    The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true.  That is the fatality of faith.

     Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.  Conscience makes egotists of us all.

     Her death has all the pathetic uselessness of martyrdom.

    Religion?  The fashionable substitute for belief.

    Scepticism is the beginning of faith.

    Humanity takes itself too seriously.  It is the world's original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different.

    Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.

    The mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.

    I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal.  It was the most premature definition ever given.

    She is very clever, too clever for a woman.  She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.  It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.

    Women treat us just as humanity treats its gods.  They worship us, and are always bothering us to do something for them.

     Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.

    Courage has passed from men to women.

    Facts fled before her like frightened forest things.