1.) We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
2.) I don’t say we all ought to misbehave. But we ought to look as if we could.
3.) Life is one fool thing after another whereas love is two fool things after each other.
4.) I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.
5.) Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
6.) I am sick of women who love one. Women who hate one are much more interesting.
7.) 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.
8.) It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.
9.) Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions. Their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
10.) Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
11.) To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
12.) Music makes one feel so romantic — at least it always gets on one’s nerves — which is the same thing nowadays.
13.) A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
14.) I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do — the day after.
15.) A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.
16.) I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
17.) A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
18.) To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
19.) Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
20.) I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
21.) Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
22.) The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
23.) One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.
24.) They’ve promised that dreams can come true – but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.
25.) If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.
26.) In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
27.) It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
28.) How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being?
29.) When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
30.) I have no objection to anyone’s sex life as long as they don’t practice it in the street and frighten the horses.
31.) You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.
32.) If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.
33.) If you don’t get everything you want, think of the things you don’t get that you don’t want.
34.) America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
35.) Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.
36.) Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
37.) Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about these things. What (women) like is to be a man’s last romance.
38.) Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend’s success.
39.) People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it’s impossible to count them accurately.
40.) If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.
41.) The only good thing to do with good advice is pass it on; it is never of any use to oneself.
42.) There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
43.) There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
44.) Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
45.) Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is by far the best ending for one.
46.) All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.
47.) There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor.
48.) I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.
49.) Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do.
50.) It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But… it is better to be good than to be ugly.