A man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world. The future belongs to the dandy. It is the exquisites who are going to rule.
A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE |
All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.
THE PORTRAIT OF MR. W.H. |
And now you must run away, for I am dining with some very dull people, who won't talk scandal, and I know that if I don't get my sleep now I shall never be able to keep awake during dinner.
LORD ARTHUR SAVILE'S CRIME |
Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everybody in good society holds exactly the same opinions.
THE REMARKABLE ROCKET |
Can't make out how you stand London Society. The thing has gone to the dogs, a lot of damned nobodies talking about nothing.
AN IDEAL HUSBAND |
Charming ball it has been! Quite reminds me of old days. And I see that there are just as many fools in society as there used to be. So pleased to find that nothing has altered!
LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN |
Exercise! The only possible form of exercise is to talk, not walk.
INTERVIEW FOR The Sketch |
Good people exasperate one's reason, bad people stir one's imagination.
DEFENCE OF DORIAN GRAY |
Hester: I dislike London dinner-parties.
Mrs. Allonby: I adore them. The clever people never listen, and the stupid people never talk.
A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE |
I always like the last person who is introduced to me; but, as a rule, as soon as I know people I get tired of them.
LORD ARTHUR SAVILE'S CRIME |
I have always had grave suspicions that the basis of all literary cliques is a morbid love of meat teas. That makes them sadly uncivilised.
INTERVIEW FOR The Sketch |
I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don't interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY |
If it were not for the running-ground at Eton, the towing-path at Oxford, the Thames swimming baths, and the yearly circuses, humanity would forget the plastic perfection of its own form, and degenerate into a race of short-sighted professors, and spectacled predeuses!
LONDON MODELS |
If there was less sympathy in the world there would be less trouble in the world.
DE PROFUNDIS |
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.
LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN |
In literature mere egotism is delightful. . . Even in actual life egotism is not without its attractions. When people talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about themselves they are nearly always interesting, and if one could shut them up, when they become wearisome, as easily as one can shut up a book of which one has grown wearied, they would be perfect absolutely.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST |
It is absurd to divide people into good or bad. People are either charming or tedious.
LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN |
It is my last reception, and one wants something that will encourage conversation, particularly at the end of the season when everyone has practically said whatever they had to say, which, in most cases, was probably not much.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST |
It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about nowadays, saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely true.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY |
Lady Caroline: In my young days, Miss Worsley, one never met any one in society who worked for their living. It was not considered the thing.
Hester. In America those are the people we respect most. Lady Caroline: I have no doubt of it.
A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE |
Lord Goring: Too much experience is a dangerous thing. Pray have a cigarette. Half the pretty women in London smoke cigarettes. Personally I prefer the other half.
Mrs. Cheveley: Thanks. I never smoke. My dressmaker wouldn't like it, and a woman's first duty is to her dressmaker, isn't it? What the second duty is, no one has as yet discovered.
AN IDEAL HUSBAND |
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their life a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
DE PROFUNDIS |
Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can't get into it do that.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST |
Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly.
AN IDEAL HUSBAND |
Oh! I don't care about the London season! It is too matrimonial. People are either hunting for husbands, or hiding from them.
AN IDEAL HUSBAND |
Oh! 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.
A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE |
Oh, I love London Society! I think it has immensely improved. It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what Society should be.
AN IDEAL HUSBAND |
Oh, I should fancy Mrs. Cheveley is one of those very modern women of our time who find a new scandal as becoming as a new bonnet, and air them both in the Park every afternoon at five-thirty.
AN IDEAL HUSBAND |
Oh, your English society seems to me shallow, selfish, foolish. It has blinded its eyes, and stopped its ears. It lies like a leper in purple. It sits like a dead thing smeared with gold. It is all wrong, all wrong.
A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE |
One has never heard his name before in the whole course of one's life, which speaks volumes for a man, nowadays.
A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE |
One is sure to be disappointed if one tries to get romance out of modern life.
VERA, OR THE NIHILISTS |
People nowadays are so absolutely superficial that they don't understand the philosophy of the superficial.
A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE |
Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST |
Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishments on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realise what it has done.
DE PROFUNDIS |
Society, civilised society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY |
The artist is always the munificent patron of the public. I am very fond of the public, and, personally, I always patronise the public very much.
INTERVIEW FOR The Sketch |
The fact is that our Society is terribly over-populated. Really some one should arrange a proper scheme of assisted emigration. It would do a great deal of good.
AN IDEAL HUSBAND |
The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear.
THE DECAY OF LYING |
The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up.
THE SOUL OF MAN UNDER SOCIALISM |
The security of Society lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of the stability of Society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence of any intelligence amongst its members.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST |
There is no reason why a man should show his life to the world. The world does not understand things.
DE PROFUNDIS |
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY |
There is the same world for all of us, and good and evil, sin and innocence, go through it hand in hand.
LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN |
They drove me out to see the great prisons afterwards! Poor odd types of humanity in hideous striped dresses making bricks in the sun, and all mean-looking, which consoled me, for I should hate to see a criminal with a noble face.
LETTER TO HELENA SICKERT |
To get into the best society, nowadays, one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people - that is all!
A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE |
We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY |
We live in the age of the over-worked, and under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST |
What is interesting about people in good Society is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask.
THE DECAY OF LYING |
Whenever people agree with me, I always feel I must be wrong.
LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN |
Yes, the public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST |
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