***psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analysed, women . . .
merely adored.
***Questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes
are
***I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only
thing I know anything about.
*** It is a very dangerous thing to listen. If one listens one may be
convinced; and a man who allows himself to be convinced by an
argument is a thoroughly unreasonable person.
*** I intend to play quite
fairly with you. One should always play fairly . . . when one has
the winning cards.
*** I always pass on good
advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use
to oneself.
*** In fact, I usually say what I really think. A
great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood.
*** Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be
absolutely deaf
*** when the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.
*** Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.
*** To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance
***there's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It's a thing no married man knows anything about.
*** So much marriage is certainly not becoming.
Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin; but twenty
years of marriage make her something like a public building.
*** I never intend to grow old. The soul is born
old but grows young. That is the comedy of life.
And the body is born young and grows old. That is
life's tragedy.
*** One can survive everything nowadays, except
death, and live down anything except a good reputation.
*** Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is
their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about
things. What we like is to be a man's last romance.
*** How can a woman be expected to be happy
with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly
rational being?
*** The Ideal Man! Oh, the Ideal Man should talk to us
as if we were goddesses, and treat us as if we were children. He
should refuse all our serious requests, and gratify every one of
our whims. He should encourage us to have caprices, and forbid us
to have missions. He should always say much more than he means,
and always mean much more than he says.
If we ask him a question about anything, he should
give us an answer all about ourselves. He should invariably praise
us for whatever qualities he knows we haven't got. But he should
be pitiless, quite pitiless, in reproaching us for the virtues that
we have never dreamed of possessing. He should never believe that
we know the use of useful things. That would be unforgiveable.
But he should shower on us everything we don't want. He should persistently compromise us in public, and treat us with absolute respect when we are alone. And yet he should be always ready to have a perfectly terrible scene, whenever we want one, and to become miserable, absolutely miserable, at a moment's notice, and to overwhelm us with just reproaches in less than twenty minutes, and to be positively violent at the end of half an hour, and to leave us for ever at a quarter to eight, when we have to go and dress for dinner. And when, after that, one has seen him for really the last time, and he has refused to take back the little things he has given one, and promised never to communicate with one again, or to write one any foolish letters, he should be perfectly broken-hearted, and telegraph to one all day long, and send one little notes every half-hour by a private
hansom, and dine quite alone at the club, so that every one should
know how unhappy he was. And after a whole dreadful week, during
which one has gone about everywhere with one's husband, just to
show how absolutely lonely one was, he may be given a third last
parting, in the evening, and then, if his conduct has been quite
irreproachable, and one has behaved really badly to him, he should
be allowed to admit that he has been entirely in the wrong, and
when he has admitted that, it becomes a woman's duty to forgive,
and one can do it all over again from the beginning, with
variations.
*** All women become like their mothers. That is their
tragedy. No man does. That is his.
*** Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they
judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
*** Examinations are of no value whatsoever. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.
! *** talk to every woman as if you loved her, and
to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first
season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect
social tact.
*** To get into the best society, nowadays, one has
either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people - that is all
*** You should never try to understand them. Women
are pictures. Men are problems. If you want to know what a woman
really means - which, by the way, is always a dangerous thing to do
- look at her, don't listen to her.
*** Women represent the triumph of matter over mind - just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.
*** Women are a fascinatingly wilful sex. Every woman
is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself.
*** Men marry because they are tired; women because
they are curious. Both are disappointed.
*** Only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
*** Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.
*** The truth is rarely pure and never simple
***I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone
*** The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to
her, if she is pretty, and to some one else, if she is plain.
***by persistently remaining single, a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation.
*** you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection.
*** To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long
engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each
other's character before marriage, which I think is never
advisable.
*** The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse
*** for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
*** Beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful.
*** I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing
that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us.
*** and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties I never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what I am doing. When we meet--we do meet occasionally, when we dine out together, or go down to the Duke's--we tell each other the most absurd stories with the most serious faces. My wife is very good at it--much better, in fact, than I am. She never gets confused over her dates, and I always do. But when she does find me out, she makes no row at all. I sometimes wish she would; but she merely laughs at me."
*** and as for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is
quite incredible."
*** She is a peacock in everything but beauty.
*** Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship,
and it is far the best ending for one,"
*** I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for
their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellect
*** But I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.
***the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be,
as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants,
his desires, or his prejudices.
*** I like persons better than principles, and I like persons
with no principles better than anything else in the world
*** but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man--that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.
*** Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love:
it is the faithless who know love's tragedies
*** "There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray.
All influence is immoral--immoral from the scientific point
of view."
"Why?"
"Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul.
He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly--that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays.
They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes
to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry
and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked.
Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it.
The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God,
which is the secret of religion--these are the two things that govern us.
*** The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things
it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous
laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said
that the great events of the world take place in the brain.
It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins
of the world take place also
*** "Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul."
***" Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer."
*** "She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do.
*** Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.
*** I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.
*** When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good,
we are not always happy."
*** Beautiful sins, like beautiful things,
are the privilege of the rich."
*** no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized
man ever knows what a pleasure is."
*** "Being adored is a nuisance.
Women treat us just as humanity treats its gods.
They worship us, and are always bothering us to do something
for them."
*** A cigarette is the perfect type
of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.
What more can one want?
*** There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating--
people who know absolutely everything, and people who know
absolutely nothing
*** women were better
suited to bear sorrow than men. They lived on their emotions.
They only thought of their emotions. When they took lovers,
it was merely to have some one with whom they could have scenes.
*** When we blame ourselves, we feel that no
one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest,
that gives us absolution.
*** "the only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him
so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
*** That awful memory of woman!
What a fearful thing it is! And what an utter intellectual
stagnation it reveals! One should absorb the colour of life,
but one should never remember its details. Details are always
vulgar."
The one charm of the past is that it is the past.
But women never know when the curtain has fallen.
They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest
of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it.
If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have
a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce.
They are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art.
*** "I am afraid that women appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty,
more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts.
We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters,
all the same. They love being dominated
*** Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face.
It cannot be concealed.
*** But youth smiles without any reason.
It is one of its chiefest charms.
*** When a woman marries again, it is
because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again,
it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck;
men risk theirs."
*** "A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her."