Return to...

1. 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.

2. I can resist anything except temptation.

3. Dear Lord Darlington, how thoroughly depraved you are!

4. Many a woman has a past…

5. Crying is the refuge of plain women, but the ruin of pretty ones.

6. Misfortunes one can endure - they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer from one’s own faults - ah! - there is the sting of life.

7. How hard good women are!

8. How weak bad men are!

9. None of us men do look what we really are.

10. My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don’t know anything at all.

11. Cowards are always pale

12. Between men and women, there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

13. There are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely - or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading, existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.

14. Go out of this house, with head erect, with a smile upon your lips, with courage in your eyes.

15. Lady Windemere has the uncommon thing called common sense.

16. And there is a great deal of good in Lord Augustus. Fortunately, it is all on the surface. Just where good qualities should be.

17. With a proper background, women can do anything.

18. In modern life, margin is everything.

19. You are on the brink of ruin; you are on the brink of a hideous precipice.

20. If suffering be an expiation, then at this moment, I have expiated all my faults, whatever they have been.