“Some things are more precious because they don't last long.” 

“Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.” 

“Nowadays 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.” 

“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” 

“If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life.” 

Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.

Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.

It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life, that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

Life is a succession of lessons, which must be lived to be understood.

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

Life is a journey, not a destination

Life is our dictionary.

The one prudence in life is concentration.

Life is a progress, and not a station.

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.” 

“There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.” 

“Everything in moderation, including moderation.” 

“Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?” 

“The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.” 

“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.” 

“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.” 

“Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.” 

“We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.” 

“You seem to forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.” 

“I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life.” 

“My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect---simply a confession of failures. Faithfulness! I must analyse it some day. The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up. But I don't want to interrupt you. Go on with your story. ” 

“It is a sad thing to think of, 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.” 

“Her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good.” 

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.” 

“I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.” 

“You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.” 

“Yes, very sensible... People die of common sense, Dorian, one lost moment at a time. Life is a moment. There is no hereafter. So make it burn always with the hardest flame.” 

“Every impulse we strangle will only poison us.” 

“Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to someone who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day.” 

Most of the shadows of this life are caused by our standing in our own sunshine. 

To fill the hour – that is happiness.

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their aint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace.

And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.

All the good of nature is the soul’s, and may be had, if paid for in nature’s lawful coin, that is, by labor which the heart and the head allow.

I no longer wish to meet a good I do not earn, for example, to find a pot of buried gold, knowing that it brings with it new burdens.

“Most people are boring and stupid.” 

“But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.” 

“A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.” 

“Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.” 

“When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I daresay, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one's life.”