| The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. |
| Consistency is the last resort of the unimaginative. |
| Some cause happiness wherever they go others whenever they go. |
| Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing. |
| Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul. |
| Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance. |
| True friends stab you in the front. |
| All that I desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. |
| The basis of optimism is sheer terror. |
| The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. |
| The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. |
| By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. |
| Yet each man kills the thing he loves,By each let this be heard,Some do it with a bitter look,Some with a flattering word,The koward does it with a kiss,The brave man with a sword |
| Woman begins by resisting a man's advances and ends by blocking his retreat. |
| One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be. |
| America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up. |
| Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. |
| Biography lends to death a new terror. |
| A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her. |
| Arguments are to be avoided they are always vulgar and often convincing. |
| I am not young enough to know everything. |
| America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. |
| I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones. |
| Always forgive your enemies nothing annoys them so much. |
| One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards. |
| Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. |
| Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays. |
| It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information. |
| One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation. |
| Morality, like art, means a drawing a line someplace. |
| Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event. |
| I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability. |
| I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again. |
| Illusion is the first of all pleasures. |
| Why was I born with such contemporaries |
| One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar. |
| Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong. |
| When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers. |
| To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity. |
| Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow. |
| Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. |
| The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself. |
| The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. |
| Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast. |
| Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about. |
| I can resist anything but temptation. |
| Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. |
| One's real life is often the life that one does not lead. |
| Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. |
| It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. |
| The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for. |
| We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. |
| Work is the curse of the drinking classes. |
| To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune to lose both looks like carelessness. |
| One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason. |
| We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language. |
| A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal. |
| Only the shallow know themselves. |
| It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art. |
| The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius. |
| But what is the difference between literature and journalism ...Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all. |
| I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex. |
| Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes. |
| A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. |
| Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years. |
| It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating. |
| I love acting. It is so much more real than life. |
| I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. |
| I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible. |
| Children begin by loving their parents as they grow older they judge them sometimes they forgive them. |
| I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world. |
| There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution. |
| The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional. |
| Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected. |
| When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck men risk theirs. |
| One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing. |
| To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable. |
| The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. |
| 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. |
| There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up. |
| Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success. |
| There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. |
| I suppose that I shall have to die beyond my means. |
| Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives. |
| Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects. |
