It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.

Lord Henry had not yet come in. He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.

One can live for years sometimes without living at all, and then all life comes crowding into one single hour.

I have pleasures, and passions, but the joy of life is gone. I am going under: the morgue yawns for me. I go and look at my zinc-bed there. After all, I had a wonderful life, which is, I fear, over.

When he takes the knife to the canvass the servants find him lying dead with a knife through is heart and withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. and the portrait in all the wonders of his exquisite youth and beauty. p 349

Life at times loses its sense of reality; it appears to us like a weird, optical illusion - a phantasmagoric bubble that will disappear at the slightest breath.

Lord Henry had not come in yet. He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.

I don't desire to change anything in England except the weather

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

He felt that life was changeful, fluid, active, and that to allow it to be stereotyped into any form was death. He saw that people should not be too serious over material, common interests: that to be unpractical was to be a great thing: that one should not bother too much over affairs. The birds didn't, why should man?