Lord Henry Wotton

"Beauty is a form of genius—is higher, indeed, than genius."

"To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance."

"One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry."

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."

"I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects."

"Conscience and cowardice are really the same things."

"Youth is the only thing worth having."

"When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving oneself, and one always ends by deceiving others."

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

"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."

"Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music."

"There are only two kinds of people in the world that are really fascinating—people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."

"The very essence of romance is uncertainty."

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

"I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it simply a tragedy."

"Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others."

"Emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art."

"The world will always laugh at those who try to be clever."

"What is past is past. What one has to deal with is the present."

"To define is to limit."

"But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins."

"I can forgive Mr. Dorian Gray for painting a bad picture, but I cannot forgive him for painting a picture that is not bad enough."

"It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of the world."

"The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty, and to someone else if she is plain."

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

"You remind me of a wonderful sonnet, but I cannot remember whose."

"The secret to remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming."

"Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws of human nature."

"It is the world that makes use of you, not you that make use of the world."

"Do you really believe that it is weakness that yields to temptation?"