Lord Henry Wotton

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

And how delightful other people's emotions were!—much more delightful than their ideas.

Ah! realise your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing....

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

The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern us.

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

You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never has the courage to commit.

It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one`s back that are absolutely and entirely true.

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

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

"But I didn't say he was married. I said he was engaged to be married. There is a great difference. I have a distinct remembrance of being married, but I have no recollection at all of being engaged. I am inclined to think that I never was engaged.

I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

Life has been your art.

They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.

I like men who have a future and women who have a past.

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