True friends stab you in the front.

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.

An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.

Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.

Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one's reason; bad people stir one's imagination.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

She is a peacock in everything but beauty.

Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, a possession for all eternity.

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.

Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.

Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

Yes, there is a terrible moral in 'Dorian Gray' - a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.

Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.

Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

Who, being loved, is poor?

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

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

Biography lends to death a new terror.

One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances, invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.

Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.