Oscar Wilde Quotes

Oscar Wilde

Biography

Type: Irish author, Playwright, Poet

Born: 16 October 1854

Died: 30 November 1900

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish author, playwright and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Wilde's parents were successful Anglo-Irish Dublin intellectuals. His father, William Wilde, was an acclaimed doctor who was knighted for his work as medical advisor for the Irish censuses. William Wilde later founded St.

Oscar Wilde Quotes

A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her..
A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.. Oscar Wilde
I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.

I have nothing to declare except my genius.. Oscar Wilde
I have nothing to declare except my genius.

I like men who have a future and women who have a past.. Oscar Wilde
I like men who have a future and women who have a past.

You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you
You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.. Oscar
If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.

If a woman cannot make her mistakes charming, she is only a female.. Oscar Wilde
If a woman cannot make her mistakes charming, she is only a female.

Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.. Oscar Wilde
Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.

The heart was made to be broken.. Oscar Wilde
The heart was made to be broken.

The very essence of romance is uncertainty.. Oscar Wilde
The very essence of romance is uncertainty.

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.. Oscar Wilde
To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves By each let this be heard Some do
Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard
Some do it with a bitter look
Some with a flattering word
The coward does it with a kiss
The brave man with a sword

One should always be in love. That's the reason one should never marry.. Oscar Wilde
One should always be in love. That's the reason one should never marry.

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the
Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring.

I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love.
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.

A kiss may ruin a human life. Oscar Wilde
A kiss may ruin a human life

I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.. Oscar Wilde
I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

No good deed goes unpunished.. Oscar Wilde
No good deed goes unpunished.

To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

The world is a stage and the play is badly cast.

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

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.

The only good thing to do with good advice is pass it on; it is never of any use to oneself.

The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.

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

Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.

One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.

Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

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.

When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.

Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again.

Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life...I have put only my talent into my works.

Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.

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

I don't like compliments and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean.

We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.

Hearts Live By Being Wounded

It takes great courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it. And even more courage to see it in the one you love

My life-my whole life- take it, and do with it what you will. I love you-love you as I have never loved any living thing. From the moment I met you I loved you, loved you blindly, adoringly,madly!

You didn't know it then-you know it now.

When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy.

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.

In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.

If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.

It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don't mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind. -Algernon

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

The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for.

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

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

Imagination is a quality that was given to man compensate him from whats not. The sense of humor was given to console him from what is.

We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.

His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion.

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.

But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.

Life is one fool thing after another whereas love is two fool things after each other.

What fire does not destroy, it hardens

What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise

Even things that are true can be proved.

She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes. That is always a sign of despair in a woman.

Women have no appreciation of good looks-at least, good women have not.

Nichts Interessantes ist jemals richtig.

Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them.

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful

LORD ILLINGWORTH: The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life.
MRS ALLONBY: And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy.

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.

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.

But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.

With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.

Die Welt ist von Narren geschaffen, damit Weise in ihr Leben.

Everything is about sex, except sex

A flower blossoms for its own joy.

The only horrible thing in the world is ennui.

Pleasure is the only thing one should live for, nothing ages like happiness.

The proper basis for marriage is mutual misunderstanding. The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married. One should always be in love - that's the reason one should never marry.

My dear fellow, it isn't easy to be anything nowadays. There's such a lot of beastly competition about.

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.

She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.

You are more to me than any of them has any idea; you are the atmosphere of beauty through which I see life; you are the incarnation of all lovely things...I think of you day and night. ~ Letter to Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas

Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.

I had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel.

He is fairer than the morning star, and whiter than the moon. For his body I would give my soul, and for his love I would surrender heaven.

The curves of your lips rewrite history.

Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.

Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.

For he who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die.

My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.

It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free.

Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man.

Nobody is worthy to be loved. The fact that God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy. Or if that phrase seems to be a bitter one to bear, let us say that everybody is worthy of love, except him who thinks he is.

There are two ways to dislike poetry: One is to dislike it; the other is to read Pope.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.

I have been right, Basil, haven’t I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.

The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses.

With slouch and swing around the ring
We trod the Fools’ Parade!
We did not care: we knew we were
The Devils’ Own Brigade:
And shaven head and feet of lead
Make a merry masquerade.

He lives the poetry that he cannot write; the others write the poetry that they dare not realize.

nothing that is worth knowing can be taught

The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing.

The English novels are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. But one should not be too severe on them. They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study.

You can never be overdressed or overeducated.

To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.

Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

Christ did not die to save people, but to teach people how to save each other. This is, I have no doubt, a grave heresy, but it is also a fact.

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

Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.

You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.

Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level.

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

LADY BRACKNELL

To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional.

JACK: Yes, but said yourself that a severe chill was not hereditary.

ALGERNON: It usen't to be, I know - but I daresay it is now. Science is always making wonderful improvements in things.

So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape (...)

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

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The worst of it is that I am perpetually being punished for nothing; this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me. It's perfectly awful to let the mind grind itself away between the upper and nether millstones of regret and remorse without respite; with books my life would be livable - any life.

What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.

American novels, answered Lord Henry.

Si no podéis disfrutar leyendo un libro repetidas veces, de nada sirve leerlo ni una sola vez.

I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.

The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence.

Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

I have no objection to anyone’s sex life as long as they don’t practice it in the street and frighten the horses.

People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it's impossible to count them accurately.

He is really not so ugly after all, provided, of course, that one shuts one's eyes, and does not look at him.

Well I won't argue about the matter. You always want to argue about things.
That is exactly what things were originally made for.

I'm too old to know everything

Nothing spoils romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman

I wish you would tell me your secret. To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

Women treat us [men] like humanity treats gods – they worship us and keep bothering us to do something.

Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!

For myself, the only immortality I desire is to invent a new sauce.

The only possible society is oneself. To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

Punctuality is the thief of time

Time is a waste of money.

Una rosa se despertó en su sangre y ensombreció sus mejillas. Un agitado aliento separó los pétalos de sus labios, que temblaron. Sobre ella sopló algún viento sur de pasión y movió los delicados pliegos de su vestido

But somehow, I feel sure that if I lived in the country for six months, I should become so unsophisticated that no one would take the slightest notice of me.

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.

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.

Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.

As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her daughter, she is perfectly satisfied

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.

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.

She is a peacock in everything but beauty!

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.

I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.

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.

There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.

Genie währt länger als Schönheit.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Even men of the noblest possible moral character are extremely susceptible to the influence of the physical charms of others. Modern, no less then Ancient History, supplies us with many most painful examples of what I refer to. If it were not so, indeed, History would be quite unreadable.

I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.

And Beauty is a form of Genius - is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation.

Moral grounds are always the last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty.

Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.

Eᴠᴇʀʏᴛʜɪɴɢ ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅ ɪs ᴀʙᴏᴜᴛ sᴇx, ᴇxᴄᴇᴘᴛ sᴇx. Sᴇx ɪs ᴀʙᴏᴜᴛ ᴘᴏᴡᴇʀ!

A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.

Life has always poppies in her hands.

Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.

Art, like Nature, has her monsters

Out of doors one becomes abstract and impersonal.One's individuality absolutely leaves one.

It was always once springtime in my heart.

You can have your secret as long as I have your heart[.]

Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.

It is simply expression, as Henry says, that gives reality to things.

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

Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.

In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor.

Im Krieg machen die Starken die Schwachen zu Sklaven, im Frieden machen die Reichen die Armen zu Sklaven.

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

All art is quite useless.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

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

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss Money

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.

What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art

God and other artists are always a little obscure.....

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.
She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful to us.

It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.

The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.

Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it.

The ages live in history through their anachronisms.

The Noblest form of Affection

Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it.

Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.

Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.

Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it right.

Adevarul despre casatorie este acela ca te face sa nu mai fi egoist. Iar oamenii lipsiti de egoism sun incolori. Le lipseste individualitatea

Of course married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even of one's worse habits.

Die Männer heiraten, weil sie müde sind, die Frauen, weil sie neugierig sind. Beide werden enttäuscht.

Natürlich ist die Ehe nur Gewohnheit. Eine schlechte sogar. Aber man bedauert sogar den Verlust der schlechten Gewohnheit. Kann sein, dass man sie sogar am meisten bedauert.

You don't seem to realise, that in married life three is company and two is none.

No married man is ever attractive except to his wife.

Of course, married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.

Women are wonderfully practical,' murmured Lord Henry, 'much more practical than we are. In situations of that kind we often forget to say anything about marriage, and they always remind us.

Besides, every experience is of value, and whatever one may say against marriage, it is certainly an experience.

And when wind and winter harden
All the loveless land,
It will whisper of the garden,
You will understand.

There is something very morbid about modern sympathy with pain.

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

After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.

I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. 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.

To begin with, I dined there on Monday, and once a week is quite enough to dine with one's own relations.

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

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.

It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way.

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.

He wants to enslave you.'
'I shudder at the thought of being free.

I never saw sad men who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
We prisoners called the sky,
And at every happy cloud that passed
In such strange freedom by.

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

If one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.

tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play - I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.

Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?
I didn't think it polite to listen, sir.

Keen winter stabs the breasts of May
Whose crimson roses burst his frost,
Ships tempest-tossed
Will find a harbour in some bay,
And so we may.

I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.

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

Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous.

Most people are boring and stupid.

L'inferno e il paradiso sono tutti e due dentro di noi.

Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.

Friendship...is not something you learn in school,but if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship you really haven't learned anything.

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

From the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul brain and power.

I drink to separate my body from my soul.

To be really mediæval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.

What men call the shadow of the body is not the shadow of the body, but is the body of the soul.

So with curious eyes and sick surmise
We watched him day by day,
And wondered if each one of us
Would end the self-same way,
For none can tell to what red Hell
His sightless soul may stray.

Jemanden zu beeinflussen bedeutet, ihm eine fremde Seele zu geben.

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?

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor.

Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything.

Yes, murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; and when they grow older they know it.

The one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action.

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

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

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

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.

Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.

There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses.

The girl laughed again. The joy of a caged bird was in her voice.

in every pleasure, cruelty has its place...

Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.

Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

Il en est toujours ainsi des natures subtiles et raffinées. Il faut que leurs passions ploient ou broient, qu'elles choisissent de tuer ou de mourir. Seules ont la vie longue les peines légères et les légères amours. Les amours et les peines profondes succombent à leur propre plénitude.

They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everybody in good society holds exactly the same opinions.

Society, civilized society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef.

We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces

A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.

Man is many things, but he is not rational.

It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

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.

Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.

It is perfectly monstrous,' he said, at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.

A arte é a mais intensa forma de individualismo que o mundo conhece.

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