Lord Henry Wotton

Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.

Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.

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

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

Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.

There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral—immoral from the scientific point of view.

To get back one's youth, one has merely to repeat one's follies.

— Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. I hate it.
— Why?
— Because, one can survive everything nowadays except that.

What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose—how does the quotation run?—his own soul?

But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives.
We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us.
The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain.

The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth.

I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.

Ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues.

All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime.

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