Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

"It is perfectly monstrous,' he said, at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true."

"Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes."

"A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her."

"When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance."

"What fire does not destroy, it hardens"

"Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different."

"So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape (...)"

"You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one."

"Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing."

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

"You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit."

"The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it."

"Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else."

"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."

"The only horrible thing in the world is ennui."

"It is perfectly monstrous,' he said, at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true."

"There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."