The earth laughs in flowers.

The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some 20 or 30 farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape.

There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship. 

“Love! What is love? It's nothing. It's just a word. It doesn't exist. Only pleasure is important.” 

“Harry," said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, "every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.” 

“Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing character''

“The sky was pure opal now.” 

“Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.” 

“Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them.” 

“One's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it.” 

“Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.” 

“Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

Everything in nature contains all the power of nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

The ancient precept, “Know thyself”, and the modern precept, “Study nature”, become at last one maxim.

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown.

Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection.

Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing.

The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.” 

“I should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.” 

“He wants to enslave you.'

'I shudder at the thought of being free.” 

“If one were to live his life fully and completely were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream.” 

“How sad it is!" murmured Dorian Gray with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. "How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June… . If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!” 

“Women treat us [men] like humanity treats gods – they worship us and keep bothering us to do something.” 

“Society, civilized 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.” 

“Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval.” 

These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.

Every sunset brings the promise of a new dawn.

The world globes itself in a drop of dew.

Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things.

It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men. 

The power of Nature predominates over the human will in all works of even the fine arts, in all that respects their material and external circumstances. Nature paints the best part of the picture, carves the best part of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and speaks the best part of the oration.

The greatest wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

“You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.” 

“But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play— I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.” 

“There seemed to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance.” 

“Basil my dear boy puts everything that is charming in him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices his principles and his common sense. The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet a really great poet is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.” 

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.”