Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.

I've now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.

I see that any materialism in life coarsens the soul, and that the hunger of the body and the appetites of the flesh desecrate always, and often destroy.

Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sensual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.

Only the shallow know themselves.

When I see a spade, I call it a spade. I'm glad to say I have never seen a spade. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use it. It's the only thing he's fit for.

It is a vulgar error to suppose that America was ever discovered. It was merely detected.