Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its...
A sentimentalist is simply one who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. We think we can have our emotions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emo...
A man who marries without knowing Bunbury has a very tedious time of it.
I cannot choose one hundred best books because I have only written five
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth. The God of this century is wealth. To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must hav...
Why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself?
Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.
If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of m...
In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.
The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happily married life.
You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter - a girl brought up with the utmost care - to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel?
Yes,’ he cried, ‘you have killed my love! You used to stir my imagination. Now you don’t even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had g...
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...
Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.
When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring.
There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral - immoral from the scientific point of view.'
There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make one almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy,...
The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen.
The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart—hearts are made to be broken—but that it turns one’s heart to stone.