Oscar Wilde Quotes

I am not laughing, Dorian; at least I am not laughing at you. But you should not say the greatest romance of your life. You should say the first romance of your life. You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do. That is the one use of the idle classes of a country. Don't be afraid. There are exquisite things in store for you. This is merely the beginning.

To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.

Frank Harris has been received in all the great houses - once.

I see the moon like a clipped piece of silver. Like gilded bees the stars cluster round her.

The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.

Ah, on what little things does happiness depend.

Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.

...The two great turning-points of my life were when my father sent to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison.

They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist.

The best people to work for are me, myself and I.

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

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

Her love was trembling in laughter on her lips.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.

What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise for which we are later, in the fullness of time and understanding, very grateful for!

It is always worth while asking a question, though it is not always worth while answering one.

Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.

Anybody can sympathise with all the sufferings of the pal, nevertheless it involves an extremely great mother nature to sympathise by using a friend's achievement.

Alas, I am dying beyond my means.

A kiss may ruin a human life

The criminal classes are so close to us that even the policemen can see them.

A process which makes one rogue cleverer than another.

The only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.

When good Americans die they go to Paris.

One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.

To define is to limit.

Beauty is a form of Genius--is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more.

A mask tells us more than a face.

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.

The vilest deeds like poison weeds Bloom well in prison air; It is only what is good in man That wastes and withers there.

As I lounged in the Park, or strolled down Piccadilly, I used to look at everyone who passed me, and wonder, with mad curiosity, what sort of lives they led. some of them fascinated me. Others filled me with terror.

Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it, in this world.

MRS ALLONBY Is she such a mystery? LORD ILLINGWORTH She is more than a mystery - she is a mood. MRS ALLONBY Moods don't last. LORD ILLINGWORTH It is their chief charm.

This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go.

It can never be necessary to do what is not honourable.

It is a pity to make a mystery out of what should most easily be understood. There is nothing occult about the thought that all things maybe made well or made ill. A work of art is a well-made thing - that is all. It may be a well-made statue of a well-made chair or a well-made book. Art is not a special sauce applied to ordinary cooking; it is the cooking itself that is good. Most simply and generally, Art may be thought of as "The Well Doing of What Needs Doing."

And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.

Charity creates a multitude of sins.

The only possible form of exercise is to talk, not to walk.

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

Art should never be popular.

If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first.

The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.

Lady Bracknell. Good afternoon, dear Algernon, I hope you are behaving very well. Algernon. I’m feeling very well, Aunt Augusta. Lady Bracknell. That’s not quite the same thing. In fact the two things rarely go together.

I have a business appointment that I am anxious... to miss.

I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts.