A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST |
A man who moralises is usually a hyprocrite, and a woman who moralises is invariably plain.
LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN |
A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
PHRASES AND PHILOSOPHIES FOR THE USE OF THE YOUNG |
A wet Sunday, an uncouth Christian in a mackintosh, a ring of sickly white faces under a broken roof of umbrellas, and wonderful phrase flung into the air by shrill, hysterical lips. . .
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY |
Ah! It is so easy to convert others. It is so difficult to convert oneself.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST |
All crime is vulgar, just as vulgarity is crime.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY |
All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment.
DEFENCE OF DORIAN GRAY |
All repetition is anti-spiritual.
DE PROFUNDIS |
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST |
And there was also, I remember, a clergyman who wanted to be a lunatic, or a lunatic who wanted to be a clergyman, I forget which. . .
A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE |
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.
PHRASES AND PHILOSOPHIES FOR THE USE OF THE YOUNG |
As for the Church, I cannot conceive anything better for the culture of a country than the presence in it of a body of men whose duty it is to believe in the supernatural, to perform miracles, and to keep alive that mythopoeic faculty which is so essential for the imagination.
THE DECAY OF LYING |
As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST |
Cecil Graham: What is a cynic?
Lord Darlington: A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN |
Charity, as even those of whose religion it makes a formal part have been compelled to acknowledge, creates a multitude of evils.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST |
Conscience and cowardice are really the same things. . . Conscience is the trade name of the firm. That is all.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY |
Conscience is but the name which cowardice Fleeing from battle scrawls upon its shield.
THE DUCHESS OF PADUA |
Crime in England is rarely the result of sin. It is nearly always the result of starvation.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST |
Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness.
PHRASES AND PHILOSOPHIES FOR THE USE OF THE YOUNG |
Early in life she had discovered the important truth that nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion; and by a series of escapades, half of them quite harmless, she had acquired all the privileges of a personality.
LORD ARTHUR SAVILE'S CRIME |
Even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right and wrong.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST |
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN |
For what is Truth? In matters of religion, it is simply the opinion that has survived.
THE DECAY OF LYING |
Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious emotions that have a certain charm for the weak.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY |
'How well you talk!' said the Miller's Wife, pouring herself out a large glass of warm ale; 'really I feel quite drowsy. It is just like being in church.'
THE DEVOTED FRIEND |
I am sure the Clergyman himself could not say such beautiful things as you do, though he does live in a three-storied house, and wear a gold ring on his little finger.
THE DEVOTED FRIEND |
I can't understand this modern mania for curates. In my time we girls saw them, of course, running about the place like rabbits. But we never took any notice of them, I need hardly say. But I am told that nowadays country society is quite honeycombed with them. I think it most irreligious.
AN IDEAL HUSBAND |
I did not sell myself for money. I bought success at a great price.
AN IDEAL HUSBAND |
Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better.
LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN |
If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.
PHRASES AND PHILOSOPHIES FOR THE USE OF THE YOUNG |
In fact, you should be thinking about me. I am always thinking about myself, and I expect everybody else to do the same. That is what is called sympathy. It is a beautiful virtue, and I possess it in a high degree.
THE REMARKABLE ROCKET |
In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST |
In the English Church a man succeeds, not through his capacity for belief, but through his capacity for disbelief. Ours is the only Church where the sceptic stands at the altar, and where St. Thomas is regarded as the ideal apostle.
THE DECAY OF LYING |
In the soul of one who is ignorant there is always room for a great idea.
DE PROFUNDIS |
Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities.
VERA, OR THE NIHILISTS |
Indiscretion is the better part of valour.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST |
It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal.
THE PORTRAIT OF MR. W.H. |
It is only the shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY |
It is the confession, not the priest that gives us absolution.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY |
It is very difficult to keep awake, especially at church.
THE CANTERVILLE GHOST |
Lady Stutfield: There is nothing, nothing like the beauty of home-life, is there?
Kelvil: It is the mainstay of our moral system in England, Lady Stutfield. Without it we would become like our neighbours.
A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE |
Life is simply a mauvais quart d'heure made up of exquisite moments.
A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE |
Look at the successful men in any of the professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY |
Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.
THE DECAY OF LYING |
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST |
Manners before morals!
LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN |
Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY |
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.
AN IDEAL HUSBAND |
Murder is always a mistake. . . One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY |
My dear Rachel, intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in morals mean absolutely nothing.
A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE |
Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY |
Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics.
THE CANTERVILLE GHOST |
One can survive everything nowadays, except death, and live down anything except a good reputation.
A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE |
One should never take sides in anything. . . Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore.
A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE |
'Religion?' 'The fashionable substitute for Belief
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY |
Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.
PHRASES AND PHILOSOPHIES FOR THE USE OF THE YOUNG |
Secrets from other people's wives are a necessary luxury in modern life. So, at least, I am always told at the club by people who are bald enough to know better.
AN IDEAL HUSBAND |
Sentimentality is merely the Bank Holiday of cynicism.
DE PROFUNDIS |
Shallow speakers and shallow thinkers in pulpits and on platforms often talk about the world's worship of pleasure, and whine against it.
THE SOUL OF MAN UNDER SOCIALISM |
Sins of the flesh are nothing. They are maladies for physicians to cure, if they should be cured. Sins of the soul alone are shameful.
DE PROFUNDIS |
Sir Robert Chihern: But may I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays.
Mrs. Cheveley: Oh, I'm neither. Optimism begins in a broad grin, and Pessimism ends with blue spectacles.
AN IDEAL HUSBAND |
The basis of every scandal is an absolutely immoral certainty.
A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE |
The costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY |
The man who sees both sides of a question, is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST |
The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE |
The only horrible thing in the world is ennui. . . That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY |
The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling I have always cultivated.
THE REMARKABLE ROCKET |
The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of Faith, and the lesson of Romance.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY |
The two weak points in our age are its want of principle and its want of profile.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST |
The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
LORD ARTHUR SAVILE'S CRIME |
There are few things easier than to live badly and to die well.
VERA, OR THE NIHILISTS |
There is a fatality about all good resolutions. They are invariably made too soon.
PHRASES AND PHILOSOPHIES FOR THE USE OF THE YOUNG |
There is no essential incongruity between crime and culture. We cannot re-write the whole of history for the purpose of gratifying our moral sense of what should be.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST |
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY |
There is nothing in the whole world so unbecoming to a woman as a Nonconformist conscience.
LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN |
They all come to bad ends, and showed that universal altruism is as bad in its results as universal egotism.
ON A CHINESE SAGE' [CONFUCIUS] |
They love me very much - simple, loyal people; give them a new saint, it costs nothing.
VERA, OR THE NIHILISTS |
They were stupid enough to have principles, and unfortunate enough to act up to them.
ON A CHINESE SAGE' [CONFUCIUS] |
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY |
Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither.
PHRASES AND PHILOSOPHIES FOR THE USE OF THE YOUNG |
To die for one's theological beliefs is the worst use a man can make of his life.
THE PORTRAIT OF MR. W.H. |
To morals belong the lower and less intellectual spheres.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST |
To the wickedness of the Papacy humanity owes much. The goodness of the Papacy owes a terrible debt to humanity.
THE SOUL OF MAN UNDER SOCIALISM |
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN |
We cannot go back to the saint. There is far more to be learned from the sinner.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST |
What a Communist the Prince is! He would have an equal distribution of sin as well as of property.
VERA, OR THE NIHILISTS |
What a mistake it is to be sincere!
VERA, OR THE NIHILISTS |
What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST |
What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST |
When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST |
When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.
AN IDEAL HUSBAND |
Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.
PHRASES AND PHILOSOPHIES FOR THE USE OF THE YOUNG |
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