Lord Henry Wotton

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

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."

"Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic."

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

"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul."

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

"Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about."

"My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people."

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

"If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart."

"The basis of optimism is sheer terror."

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

"I suppose the more one knows the more one discovers that ignorance was bliss."

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

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

"What a fuss people make about fidelity! Why, even in love it is purely a question of physiology."

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

"I can forgive my enemies for not being Aristoteles; the Germans cannot forgive me for being Goethe."

"Conscience and cowardice are really the same things."

"There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love."

"The only way for a woman to behave to a woman who behaves badly is to behave worse."

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

"I can resist everything except temptation."

"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."

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

"Conscience is a coward."

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

"I am too fond of reading books to care to write them."

"The basis of optimism is sheer terror."

"Experience is merely the name we give our mistakes."