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. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. 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.

Miss Prism: And you do not seem to realize, dear Doctor, that by persistently remaining single, a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation. Men should be more careful; this very celibacy leads weaker vessels astray. Chasuble: But is a man not equally attractive when married? Miss Prism: No married man is ever attractive except to his wife. Chasuble: And often, I've been told, not even to her.

One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.

For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.

Never regret thy fall, O Icarus of the fearless flight For the greatest tragedy of them all Is never to feel the burning light.

In the old times men carried out their rights for themselves as they lived, but nowadays every baby seems born with a social manifesto in its mouth much bigger than itself.

I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die.