Quote collection
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"Sometime you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such thing as romantic experience; there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance- that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long someday to feel"
"When one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time, not one's own."
"Love is not fashionable anymore; the poets have killed it."
"Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching."
"Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfillment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic"
"It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things."
"There is a fatality about good resolutions – that they are always made too late"
"Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labor."
"In fact, I am never wrong."
"He wants to enslave you.' 'I shudder at the thought of being free."
"I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world… And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom."
"Only people who look dull ever get into the House of Commons, and only people who are dull ever succeed there."
"To get into the best society, nowadays, one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people - that is all!"
"I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to say so. ... Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still."
"The liar at any rate recognizes that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilized being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company."
"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 forever. 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."
"It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal."
"It is art, and art only, that reveals us to ourselves."
"I feel that if I kept it secret it might grow in my mind (as poisonous things grow in the dark) and take its place with the other terrible thoughts that gnaw me"
"Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous."