Lord Henry Wotton

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

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

"It is what you are that matters, not what you have been."

"There is no such thing as a good influence. All influence is immoral."

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence of that world is a form of a joke."

"I can resist everything except temptation."

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."

"Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know."

"What is past is of little account. The present is what counts."

"One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards."

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

"I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream."

"Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner."

"The basis of optimism is sheer terror."

"Youth is the one thing worth having."

"To define is to limit."

"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes."

"I am afraid I cannot claim to be a cynic. What I am is a realist."

"The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else."

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

"Conscience and cowardice are really the same things."

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

"Each time one loves is the only time one has ever loved."

"There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies."

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

"A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure."

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

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

"The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young."

"Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face."