Oscar Wilde Quotes

I delight in men over seventy. They always offer one the devotion of a lifetime.

But she is happiest alone. She is happiest alone.

When I went to America I had two secretaries, one for autographs, one for locks of hair. Within six months the one had died of writer's cramp, the other was completely bald.

I don't recognize you - I've changed a lot.

Men are such cowards. They outrage every law in the world and are afraid of the world's tongue.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want.

There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act and circumstand, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous, and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own.

There is no good talking to him," said a Dragon-fly, who was sitting on the top of a large brown bulrush; "no good at all, for he has gone away." "Well, that is his loss, not mine," answered the Rocket. "I am not going to stop talking to him merely because he pays no attention. I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself, and I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying." "Then you should definitely lecture on Philosophy," said the Dragon-fly.

The fatal errors of life are not due to man's being unreasonable: an unreasonable moment may be one's finest moment. They are due to man's being logical.

The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.

Hearts Live By Being Wounded

Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects.

How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.

Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.

The proper school to learn art is not life but art

Art never expresses anything but itself.

Rugby is a game for barbarians played by gentlemen. Football is a game for gentlemen played by barbarians.

I don't know how to talk. Oh! talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact.

It is better to repent a sin than regret the loss of a pleasure.

For, try as we may, we cannot get behind the appearence of things to reality. And the terrible reason may be that there is no reality in the things apart from their appearences.

I don't want to earn a living. I want to live.

Prism! Where is that baby?

Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation.

Yes; poor Bunbury is a dreadful invalid. Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shillyshallying with the question is absurd.

The optimist sees the donut, the pessimist sees the hole.

And now, I am dying beyond my means. (Said while sipping champagne on his deathbed.)

I like talking to a brick wall- it's the only thing in the world that never contradicts me!

The only way to get rid of tempation is to yeild to it.

Newspapers have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon.

Do you really keep a diary? I'd give anything to look at it. May I? Oh, no. You see, it is simply a very young girl's record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy.

People fashion their God after their own understanding. They make their God first and worship him afterwards.

I would not a bit mind sleeping in the cool grass in summer, and when winter came on sheltering myself by the warm close-thatched rick, or under the penthouse of a great barn, provided I had love in my heart.

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

Conversation should touch everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing.

Missionaries are going to reform the world whether it wants to or not.

We have quite the same ideas. No; I think our ideas are quite different. But he has been most pleasant.

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

As yet, Bernard Shaw hasn't become prominent enough to have any enemies, but none of his friends like him.

The supreme object of life is to live. Few people live. It is true life only to realize one's own perfection, to make one's every dream a reality.

America is the noisiest country that ever existed. One is waked up in the morning, not by the singing of the nightingale, but by the steam whistle.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.

A method of procuring sensations? Do you think then, that a man who has once committed a murder could possibly do the same crime again? Don't tell me that." says Dorian. "Oh! anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often," says Lord Henry

Disobedience is man's original virtue.

What consoles one nowadays is not repentance but pleasure. Repentance is quite out of date.

The modern sympathy with invalids is morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others.

If the poor only had profiles there would be no difficulty in solving the problem of poverty

It was you I thought of all the time, I gave to them the love you did not need: lavished on them a love that was not theirs.