Oscar Wilde Quotes
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Nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion.
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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.
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Between the optimist and the pessimist, the difference is droll. The optimist sees the doughnut; the pessimist the hole!
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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.
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Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.
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In the wild struggle for existance, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.
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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.
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Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.
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Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn't there, and finding it.
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Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.
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Comfort is the only thing our civilization can give us.
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The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.
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The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable.
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It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.
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The world has been made by fools that wise men may live in it.
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However, it is always nice to be expected, and not to arrive.
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The best way to enjoy your job is to imagine yourself without one.
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I am not at all cynical, I have merely got experience, which, however, is very much the same thing.
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My great mistake, the fault for which I can’t forgive myself, is that one day I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my own individuality.
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Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.
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If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.
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If people were meant to be nude, they would have been born this way.
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I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.
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The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.