"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"
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation"
"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious"
"It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information"
"In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin"
"It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes"
"It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art"
"It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating"
"The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means"
"Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement"
"Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities"
"Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more"
"Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both"
"Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected"
"The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray"
"One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be"
"The man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world"
"The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself"
"The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties"
"The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything"
"Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life"
"Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to"
"The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic"
"What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing"
"I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly"
"Those whom the gods love grow young"
"One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead"
"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing"
"Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects"
"If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism"
"If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized"
"I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies"
"Charity creates a multitude of sins"
"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"
"Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason"
"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live"
"One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards"
"Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one"
"I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect"
"Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative"
"When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is"
"When good Americans die they go to Paris"
"What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying"
"There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about"
"There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else"
"There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us"
"The salesman knows nothing of what he is selling save that he is charging a great deal too much for it"
"The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius"
"There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about"
"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written"
