Oscar Wilde
"I've now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest."
"The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. It ends with Revelations."
"If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life."
"The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death."
"When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself."
"Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see life as a whole, by which and by which alone we can understand others in their real and their ideal relation. Only what is fine, and finely conceived can feed love. But anything will feed hate."
"All sins, except sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon." "Anything approaching an explanation is always derogatory to a work of art."
"Sorrow…is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it"
"There is one thing infinitely more pathetic than to have lost the woman one is in love with, and that is to have won her and found out how shallow she is!"
"I have buried my romance in a bed of asphodel."
"I put my talent into my works and my genius into my life."
"It is sweet to dance to violins When love and life are fair: To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes Is delicate and rare: But it is not sweet with nimble feet To dance upon the air!"
"…but love is not fashionable anymore, the poets have killed it. They wrote so much about it that nobody believed them, and I am not surprised. True love suffers, and is silent. I remember myself once-but no matter now. Romance is a thing of the past."
"My writing has gone to bits - like my character. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain." "I made your sorrow mine also, that you might have help in bearing it."
"I have pleasures, and passions, but the joy of life is gone. I am going under: the morgue yawns for me. I go and look at my zinc-bed there. After all, I had a wonderful life, which is, I fear, over." (Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde)
"Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleance me in the great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole." (De Profundis)
"Men marry because they are tired, women because they are curious; both are disappointed."
"Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and only then, does it come into existence."
"There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love."
"One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art."
"The public is largely influenced by the look of a book. So are we all. It is the only artistic thing about the public."
"I have made an important discovery…that alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, produces all the effects of intoxication."
"I feel that if I kept it secret it might grow in my mind (as poisonous things grow in the dark) and take its place with the other horrible thoughts that gnaw me…"
"Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the sexes."
"The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim."
"You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages."
"I blame myself without reserve for my weakness. It was merely weakness. One half-hour with Art was always more to me than a cycle with you. Nothing really at any period of my life was ever of the smallest importance to me compared with Art. but in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination." (De Profundis and Other Writings)
"I drink to separate my body from my soul."
"It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little."
"It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection; through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence."
"My desire to live is as intense as ever, and though my heart is broken, hearts are made to be broken: that is why God sends sorrow into the world."
"You and I will always be friends. Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that."
"An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty." (Dorian Gray)
"I wish I could write them down, these little coloured parables or poems that live for a moment in some cell of my brain, and then leave it to go wandering elsewhere. I hate writing' the mere act of writing a thing down is troublesome to me. I want some fine medium, and look for it in vain."
"Genius lasts longer than beauty"
"Everyone is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling."
"The great events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when one thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flower of passion seem to grow in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion. We reject the burden of their memory, and have anodynes against them. But the little things, the things of no moment, remain with us. In some tiny ivory cell the brain stores the most delicate, and the most fleeting impressions."
"Suffering is one 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…"
"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. 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. The thing that you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is happening to me now, and will happen to me again tomorrow. Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I am writing, and in this manner writing." (De Profundis and Other Writings)
"One of the great secrets of life. Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense and discover too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."
"My friend is not allowed to go out today. I sit by his side and read him passages from his own life. They fill him with surprise. Everyone should keep someone else's diary; I sometimes suspect you of keeping mine."
"When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others."
"Art only begins when Imitation ends."
"Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect."
"The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen."
"Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more." "Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes."
"Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation."
"The people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failure."
"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."
"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."
"It is only shallow people who requires years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them."
"What a silly thing love is! It is not as logic, for it does not prove anything and it is always telling one things that are not going to happen and making one believe things that are not true."
"Actions are the first tragedy of life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless . . ."
"Irony is wasted on the stupid."
"Sometimes you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such thing as romantic experience; there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance - that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long someday to feel."
"We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars."
"A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave."
"By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community."
"But whether I become a believer or remain an agnostic, my belief or disbelief must derive its source from within, not from without. I myself, must create its symbols. The transcendental is that which produces its own form. I will never discover its secret if I do not find it in my own heart; if I do not possess it already I shall never be able to acquire it."
"When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself."
"He covered page after page with wild words of sorrow and wilder words of pain. There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution."
"I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything."
"I don't write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For my own sake I must forgive you."
"Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace."
"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."
"For one moment our lives met, our souls touched."
"I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect."
"The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray."
"Memory is the diary we all carry about with us."
"I like talking to a brick wall - it's the only thing in the world that never contradicts me!"
"Men know life too early. Women know life too late. That is the difference between men and women."
"Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself."
"We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were much too afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to."
"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."
"Never regret thy fall, O Icarus of the fearless flight For the greatest tragedy of them all Is never to feel the burning light."
"To regret one's own experience is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips on one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul."
"An inordinate passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young."
"Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do."
"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."
"The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one's heart - hearts are made to be broken - but that it turns one's heart to stone."
"I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do - the day after."
"Life is a question of nerves and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance 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."
"No good artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist."
"When bankers get together they talk about art. When artists get together, they talk about money."
"If there is anything more annoying in the world than having people talk about you, it is certainly having no one talk about you."
"What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise."
"I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says."
"Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone."
"Bad artists always admire each others work."
"Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about these things. What (women) like is to be a man's last romance."
"Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship."
"The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read."
"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
"Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace."
"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."
"Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known."
"In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."
"I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world."
"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."
"Life is too short to learn German."
"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."
"We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell."
"You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear."
"There is no sin except stupidity."
"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating; people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."
"The world is a stage and the play is badly cast."
"The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing."
"Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious."
"Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic."
"Consistency is the hallmark of the unimaginative."
"The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for."
"Only the shallow know themselves."
"Youth is wasted on the young."
"To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable."
"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 romance."
"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."
"Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer."
"I like men who have a future and women who have a past."
"A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company."
"With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?"
"The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means."
"To define is to limit."
"A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."
"A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction."
"A true friend stabs you in the front."
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist. that is all."
"Anyone who lives within their means suffer from a lack of imagination."
"I am not young enough to know everything."
"Women are made to be loved not understood."
"Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future."
"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his."
"I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood. Don't degrade me into the position of giving you useful information. Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast."
"The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it."
"The very essence of romance is uncertainty."
"To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance."
"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."
"This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has to go." Reported as Oscar Wilde's last words on his death bed . . .
"The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. It ends with Revelations."
"If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life."
"The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death."
"When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself."
"Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see life as a whole, by which and by which alone we can understand others in their real and their ideal relation. Only what is fine, and finely conceived can feed love. But anything will feed hate."
"All sins, except sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon." "Anything approaching an explanation is always derogatory to a work of art."
"Sorrow…is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it"
"There is one thing infinitely more pathetic than to have lost the woman one is in love with, and that is to have won her and found out how shallow she is!"
"I have buried my romance in a bed of asphodel."
"I put my talent into my works and my genius into my life."
"It is sweet to dance to violins When love and life are fair: To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes Is delicate and rare: But it is not sweet with nimble feet To dance upon the air!"
"…but love is not fashionable anymore, the poets have killed it. They wrote so much about it that nobody believed them, and I am not surprised. True love suffers, and is silent. I remember myself once-but no matter now. Romance is a thing of the past."
"My writing has gone to bits - like my character. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain." "I made your sorrow mine also, that you might have help in bearing it."
"I have pleasures, and passions, but the joy of life is gone. I am going under: the morgue yawns for me. I go and look at my zinc-bed there. After all, I had a wonderful life, which is, I fear, over." (Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde)
"Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleance me in the great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole." (De Profundis)
"Men marry because they are tired, women because they are curious; both are disappointed."
"Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and only then, does it come into existence."
"There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love."
"One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art."
"The public is largely influenced by the look of a book. So are we all. It is the only artistic thing about the public."
"I have made an important discovery…that alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, produces all the effects of intoxication."
"I feel that if I kept it secret it might grow in my mind (as poisonous things grow in the dark) and take its place with the other horrible thoughts that gnaw me…"
"Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the sexes."
"The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim."
"You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages."
"I blame myself without reserve for my weakness. It was merely weakness. One half-hour with Art was always more to me than a cycle with you. Nothing really at any period of my life was ever of the smallest importance to me compared with Art. but in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination." (De Profundis and Other Writings)
"I drink to separate my body from my soul."
"It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little."
"It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection; through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence."
"My desire to live is as intense as ever, and though my heart is broken, hearts are made to be broken: that is why God sends sorrow into the world."
"You and I will always be friends. Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that."
"An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty." (Dorian Gray)
"I wish I could write them down, these little coloured parables or poems that live for a moment in some cell of my brain, and then leave it to go wandering elsewhere. I hate writing' the mere act of writing a thing down is troublesome to me. I want some fine medium, and look for it in vain."
"Genius lasts longer than beauty"
"Everyone is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling."
"The great events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when one thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flower of passion seem to grow in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion. We reject the burden of their memory, and have anodynes against them. But the little things, the things of no moment, remain with us. In some tiny ivory cell the brain stores the most delicate, and the most fleeting impressions."
"Suffering is one 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…"
"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. 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. The thing that you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is happening to me now, and will happen to me again tomorrow. Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I am writing, and in this manner writing." (De Profundis and Other Writings)
"One of the great secrets of life. Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense and discover too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."
"My friend is not allowed to go out today. I sit by his side and read him passages from his own life. They fill him with surprise. Everyone should keep someone else's diary; I sometimes suspect you of keeping mine."
"When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others."
"Art only begins when Imitation ends."
"Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect."
"The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen."
"Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more." "Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes."
"Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation."
"The people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failure."
"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."
"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."
"It is only shallow people who requires years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them."
"What a silly thing love is! It is not as logic, for it does not prove anything and it is always telling one things that are not going to happen and making one believe things that are not true."
"Actions are the first tragedy of life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless . . ."
"Irony is wasted on the stupid."
"Sometimes you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such thing as romantic experience; there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance - that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long someday to feel."
"We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars."
"A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave."
"By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community."
"But whether I become a believer or remain an agnostic, my belief or disbelief must derive its source from within, not from without. I myself, must create its symbols. The transcendental is that which produces its own form. I will never discover its secret if I do not find it in my own heart; if I do not possess it already I shall never be able to acquire it."
"When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself."
"He covered page after page with wild words of sorrow and wilder words of pain. There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution."
"I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything."
"I don't write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For my own sake I must forgive you."
"Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace."
"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."
"For one moment our lives met, our souls touched."
"I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect."
"The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray."
"Memory is the diary we all carry about with us."
"I like talking to a brick wall - it's the only thing in the world that never contradicts me!"
"Men know life too early. Women know life too late. That is the difference between men and women."
"Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself."
"We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were much too afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to."
"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."
"Never regret thy fall, O Icarus of the fearless flight For the greatest tragedy of them all Is never to feel the burning light."
"To regret one's own experience is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips on one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul."
"An inordinate passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young."
"Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do."
"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."
"The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one's heart - hearts are made to be broken - but that it turns one's heart to stone."
"I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do - the day after."
"Life is a question of nerves and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance 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."
"No good artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist."
"When bankers get together they talk about art. When artists get together, they talk about money."
"If there is anything more annoying in the world than having people talk about you, it is certainly having no one talk about you."
"What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise."
"I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says."
"Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone."
"Bad artists always admire each others work."
"Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about these things. What (women) like is to be a man's last romance."
"Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship."
"The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read."
"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
"Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace."
"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."
"Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known."
"In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."
"I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world."
"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."
"Life is too short to learn German."
"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."
"We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell."
"You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear."
"There is no sin except stupidity."
"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating; people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."
"The world is a stage and the play is badly cast."
"The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing."
"Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious."
"Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic."
"Consistency is the hallmark of the unimaginative."
"The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for."
"Only the shallow know themselves."
"Youth is wasted on the young."
"To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable."
"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 romance."
"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."
"Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer."
"I like men who have a future and women who have a past."
"A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company."
"With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?"
"The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means."
"To define is to limit."
"A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."
"A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction."
"A true friend stabs you in the front."
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist. that is all."
"Anyone who lives within their means suffer from a lack of imagination."
"I am not young enough to know everything."
"Women are made to be loved not understood."
"Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future."
"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his."
"I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood. Don't degrade me into the position of giving you useful information. Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast."
"The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it."
"The very essence of romance is uncertainty."
"To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance."
"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."
"This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has to go." Reported as Oscar Wilde's last words on his death bed . . .
