“Young men want to be faithful, and are not. Old men want to be faithless, and cannot.”

“What a fuss people make about fidelity!" exclaimed Lord Henry. "Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.”

“What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion.”

“Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.”

“Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.”

“In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.”

“In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.”