To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
Who, being loved, is poor?
In married life three is company and two none.
There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
We always misunderstood ourselves, and rarely understood others
You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.
Yes, death. Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forg...
When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring.
To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the...
There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtures are not...
There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral - immoral from the scientific point of view.'
The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me.
The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen.
The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.
The fatal errors of life are not due to man's being unreasonable: an unreasonable moment may be one's finest moment. They are due to man's being logical.
The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker th...
She knew nothing but she had everything he had lost.
Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at. My gods dwell in temples made with hands; and within the circle of actual experience...
My dear Algy, you talk exactly as if you were a dentist. It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn't a dentist. It produces false impression
Miss Prism: Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days. Cecily: Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end ha...