Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.

  Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness.

  In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.

  If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.

  Pleasure is the only thing one should live for. Nothing ages like happiness.

  No crime is vulgar, but all vulgarity is crime. Vulgarity is the conduct of others.

  Only the shallow know themselves.

  Time is waste of money.

  One should always be a little improbable.

  There is a fatality about all good resolutions. They are invariably made too soon.

  The only way to atone for being occasionally a little over-dressed is by being always absolutely over-educated.

  Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.

  Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

  One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.

  It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man’s deeper nature is soon found out.

  Industry is the root of all ugliness.

  The ages live in history through their anachronisms.

  The old believe everything: the middle-aged suspect everything: the young know everything.

  The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.

  Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.

  To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

  Oh, it is indeed a burning shame that there would be one law for men and another law for women. I think that there should be no law for anybody.

  After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world. (On absinthe)

  My existence is a scandal.

  It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inarticulate manner that they hurt one by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.

  Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation …

  Sins of the flesh are nothing. They are maladies for physicians to cure, if they should be cured. Sins of the soul alone are shameful.

  The aim of love is to love: no more, and no less.

  To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

  What the artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals.

  Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world.

  Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

  Every single work of art is the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image.

  … all great ideas are dangerous.

  Art only begins where Imitation ends …

  All bad art is the result of good intentions.

  By nature and by choice, I am extremely indolent.

  I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do – the day after.

  I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws.

  Praise makes me humble, but when I am abused I know I have touched the stars.

  Where will it all end? Half the world does not believe in God, and the other half does not believe in me.

  If I were all alone, marooned on some desert island and had my things with me, I should dress for dinner every evening.

  I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.

  A patriot put in prison for loving his country loves his country, and a poet in prison for loving boys loves boys. To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble, more noble than other forms.

  I entered prison with a heart of stone, thinking only of my pleasure, but now my heart has been broken; pity has entered my heart; I now understand that pity is the greatest and the most beautiful thing that there is in the world. And that’s why I can’t be angry with those who condemned me, nor with anyone, because then I would not have known all that.

  I am not a scrap ashamed of having been in prison. I am horribly ashamed of the materialism of the life that brought me there. It was quite unworthy of an artist.

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

  As soon as people are old enough to know better, they don’t know anything at all.

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

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

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

  Self-sacrifice is a thing that should be put down by law. It is so demoralizing to the people for whom one sacrifices oneself.

  English people are far more interested in American barbarism than they are in American civilization.

  Every right article of apparel belongs equally to both sexes, and there is absolutely no such thing as a definitely feminine garment.

  It is really only the idle classes who dress badly. Wherever physical labour of any kind is required, the costume used is, as a rule, absolutely right, for labour necessitates freedom, and without freedom there is no such thing as beauty in dress at all.

  With an evening coat and a white tie, anybody, even a stock-broker, can gain a reputation for being civilized.

  It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

  Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.

  Perhaps one never seems so much at one’s ease as when one has to play a part.

  I think a man should invent his own myth.

  All art is quite useless.

  No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

  The desire for beauty is merely a heightened form of the desire for life.

  Extravagance is the luxury of the poor, penury the luxury of the rich.

  We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so.

  To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

  Why should they [the poor] be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it.

  The real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich.

  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.

  The inherited stupidity of the race – sound English common sense.

  Anybody can have common sense, provided that they have no imagination.

  I love superstitions. They are the colour element of thought and imagination. They are the opponents of common sense.

  Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover, when it is too late, that the only thing one never regrets are one’s mistakes.

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

  Conversation is one of the loveliest of the arts.

  Recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation.

  The maxim ‘If you find the company dull, blame yourself’ seems to us somewhat optimistic.

  In the case of meeting a genius and a duke at dinner, the good talker will try to raise himself to the level of the former and to bring the latter down to his own level. To succeed among one’s social superiors one must have no hesitation in contradicting them.

  A man who can dominate a London dinner table can dominate the world.

  I adore them [London dinner parties]. The clever people never listen, and the stupid people never talk.

  It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.

  To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die.

  I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices.

  The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of Faith, and the lesson of Romance.

  No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

  Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.

  Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime.

  A community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment, than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.

  Prison life makes one see people and things as they really are. That is why it turns one to stone. It is the people outside who are deceived by the illusion of a life in constant motion.

  To those who are in prison, tears are a part of every day’s experience. A day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one’s heart is hard, not a day on which one’s heart is happy.

  The most terrible thing about it [imprisonment] is not that it breaks one’s heart – hearts are made to be broken – but that it turns one’s heart to stone.

  It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judge of it.

  The one advantage of playing with fire … is that one never even gets singed. It is the people who don’t know how to play with it who get burned up.

  What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

  The sentimentalist is always a cynic at heart. Indeed sentimentality is merely the bank holiday of cynicism.

  A sentimentalist is simply a man who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.

  He is a typical Englishman, always dull and usually violent.

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

  She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm.

  She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy.

  [She] talks more and says less than anybody I ever met. She is made to be a public speaker.

  A dowdy dull girl, with one of those characteristic British faces, that, once seen, are never remembered.

  Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.

  Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

  In art, as in politics, there is but one origin for all revolutions, a desire on the part of man for a nobler form of life, for a freer method and opportunity of expression.

  It is the first duty of a gentleman to dream.

  A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

  Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.

  The one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action.

  My duty to myself is to amuse myself terrifically.

  People never think of cultivating a young girl’s imagination. It is the great defect of modern education.

  We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.

  In the summer term Oxford teaches the exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach.

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

  It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.

  Beer, the Bible, and the seven deadly virtues have made our England what she is.

  The English public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it.

  A family is a terrible encumbrance, especially when one is not married.

  Fashion is merely a form of ugliness so unbearable that we are compelled to alter it every six months.

  An acquaintance that begins with a compliment is sure to develop into a real friendship. It starts in the right manner.

  Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.

  I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.

  Formal courtesies will strain a close friendship.

  Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

  This grey, monstrous London of ours, with its myriads of people, its sordid sinners, and its splendid sins.

  I don’t like Switzerland: it has produced nothing but theologians and waiters.

  There is this to be said in favour of the despot, that he, being an individual, may have culture, while the mob, being a monster, has none.

  History never repeats itself. The historians repeat each other.

  The one duty we owe to history is to re-write it.

  The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

  Laughter is the primeval attitude towards life – a mode of approach that survives only in artists and criminals.

  To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.

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

  One can live for years sometimes without living at all, and then all life comes crowding into one single hour.

  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.

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

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

  Life cheats us with shadows. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us, with bitterness and disappointment in its train.

  Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.

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

  Are there not books that can make us live more in one single hour than life can make us live in a score of shameful years?

  To introduce real people into a novel or a play is a sign of an unimaginative mind, a coarse, untutored observation, and an entire absence of style.

  The books that the world calls immoral books are books that show the world its own shame.

  No one survives being over-estimated, nor is there any surer way of destroying an author’s reputation than to glorify him without judgement and to praise him without tact.

  All love is a tragedy.

  Misunderstanding … is the basis of love.

  Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies.

  Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect – simply a confession of failure.

  Lust … makes one love all that one loathes.

  It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves.

  One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.

  The proper basis for marriage is a mutual misunderstanding.

  Married life is merely a habit, a bad habit.

  How marriage ruins a man! It’s as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.

  The happiness of a married man … depends on the people he has not married.

  The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.

  The world has grown so suspicious of anything that looks like a happy married life.

  It’s most dangerous nowadays for a husband to pay attention to his wife in public. It always makes people think he beats her when they are alone.

  Nowadays everybody is jealous of everyone else, except, of course, husband and wife.

  Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building.

  Girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don’t think it right.

  Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.

  Men know life too early … Women know life too late. That is the difference between men and women.

  The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.

  When a man has once loved a woman, he will do anything for her, except continue to love her.

  A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

  Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity … Women have a more subtle instinct about things. What [they] like is to be a man’s last romance.

  There is only one real tragedy in a woman’s life. The fact that the past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband.

  Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

  Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious.

  One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that, would tell one anything.