Oscar Wilde Quotes

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain.

I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me, before.'A dream of form in days of thought:

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

Most people are boring and stupid.

Journalism justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarist.

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

All I want to do now is look at life. You may come and look at it with me, if you care to.

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.

The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.

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.

Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

Ugh!' snarled the Wolf, as he limped through the brushwood with his tail between his legs, 'this is perfectly monstrous weather. Why doesn't the Government look to it?

The 19thc hatred of Realism is Caliban's enraged reaction to seeing his own face in the mirror. The 19thc rejection of Romanticism is Caliban's fury at not seeing his face reflected in the mirror.

It is rarely in the world's history that its ideal has been one of joy and beauty. The worship of pain has far more often dominated the world.

Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?

It's an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco.It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world

I've put my genius into my life I've only put my talent into my works.

Do you want to kill his love for you? What sort of existence will he have if you rob him of the fruits of his ambition, if you take him from the splendour of a great political career, if you close the doors of public life against him, if you condemn him to sterile failure, he who was made for triumph and success? Women are not meant to judge us but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is their mission. Why should you scourge him with rods for a sin done in his youth, before he knew you, before he knew himself? A man's life is of more value than a woman's. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. A women's life revolves around curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that man's life progresses. Don't make any terrible mistake, Lady Chiltern. A woman who can keep a man's love, and love him in return, has done all the world wants of women, or should want of them.

He would never again tempt innocence. He would be good.

They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Only the shallow know themselves.

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.

Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.

Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian...I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does. I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes.

Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.

To become a work of art is the object of living.

I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life.

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.

Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming about him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense. The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists give everything to their art, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in themselves. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures.

Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . .

People say sometimes that Beauty is superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.

A true gentlemen is one who is never unintentionally rude.

Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.

How sad it is!" murmured Dorian Gray with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. "How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June… . If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious

I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I'll certainly try to forget the fact.

Well, I don't like your clothes. You look perfectly ridiculous in them. Why on earth don't you go up and change? It's perfectly childish to be in mourning for a man who is actually staying a whole week with you in your house as a guest. I call it grotesque.

To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.

You talk books away," he said; "why don't you write one?" "I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal.

If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart.

That is one of the great secrets of life Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.

In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious. Her feet are very pretty, but they are not feet of clay. White porcelain feet, if you like. They have been through the fire, and what fire does not destroy, it hardens. She has had experiences.

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.

Lady Caroline: As far as I can make out, the young women of the present day seem to make it the sole object of their lives to be always playing with fire. Mrs. Allonby: The one advantage of playing with fire, Lady Caroline, is that one never gets even singed. It is the people who don't know how to play with it who get burned up.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.

The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty, and to someone else if she is plain.

If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.

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.

To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.