Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray

• "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."

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

• "Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different."

• "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."

• "Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot."

• "What of art? - It is a malady; Love? - An illusion; Religion - The fashionable substitute for Belief."

• "To define is to limit."

• "A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her."

• "When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife."

• "Women love with their ears, men love with their eyes."

• "Peace gives life."

• "Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that."

• "The basis of every scandal is an immoral certainty."

• "Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one."

• "All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime."

• "If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart."

• "The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of Faith and the lesson of Romance."

• "But a chance tone of colour in a room or in a morning sky, a particular perfume that you have once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you have 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."