Lord Henry Wotton

The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes.

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 virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.

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.

Ah! what a nuisance people's people are!

... you need to know this great secret of life: Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.

I like persons better than principles, and i like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

The only horrible thing in the world is ennui. That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. Worlds had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow....

It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting.

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

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

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.

...fire does not destroy, it hardens.

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible....