All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.
How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrid, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June. . . . If it was only the other way! If it was I who were to be always young, and the picture that were to grow old! For this--for this--I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give!
But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.
Some day you will look at your friend, and he will seem to you to be a little out of drawing, or you won't like his tone of colour, or something.
Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
You know how a voice can stir one. Your voice and the voice of Sibyl Vane are two things that I shall never forget.
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.
She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm.
I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.
The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot . . .
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