Цитаты из книги Selections. Volume one

Он всегда опаздывал из принципа, принцип же состоял в том, что пунктуальность - вор времени.

Чтобы вернуть молодость, я готов пойти на что угодно, за исключением занятий гимнастикой, ранних вставаний и добропорядочной жизни.

- Ох уж эти братья! Не люблю их. Мой старший всё никак не умрет, а младшие только этим и занимаются.

Куда как лучше не выделяться на фоне своих собратьев. В нашем мире спокойнее всего живется некрасивым и глупым. Им дано, удобно усевшись и разинув рот, смотреть представление.

Ах, Бэзил, в каждом из нас одновременно и рай и ад.

«The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. And unselfish people are colourless. They lack individuality.»

«Dorian is far too wise not to do foolish things now and then, my dear Basil.»

«The gods made Sibyl Vane for you. Without her you are incomplete.»

«She spiritualizes them, and one feels that they are of the same flesh and blood as one’s self.»

«We women, as someone says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.»

«Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art.»

«Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.»

«To project one’s soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one’s own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one’s temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that.»

«There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it.»

«Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. Worlds had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow.»

«Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.»

«Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.»

«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. A new hedonism — that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol.»

«Ah! Realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar.»

«It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.»