Oscar Wilde Quotes
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The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me.
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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.
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When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.
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It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone.
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All bad art is the result of good intentions.
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Cultivated leisure is the aim of man.
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Sometimes it takes courage to give into temptation.
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The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth.
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What is said of a man is nothing. The point is, who says it.
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A grand passion is the privelege of people who have nothing to do.
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The best way to make children good is to make them happy.
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I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
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The history of women is the history of the worst form of tyranny the world has ever known. The tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts.
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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.
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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.
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She lives the poetry she cannot write.
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I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.
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I see that any materialism in life coarsens the soul, and that the hunger of the body and the appetites of the flesh desecrate always, and often destroy.
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To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die.
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I could deny it if I liked. I could deny anything if I liked.
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It is a much cleverer thing to talk nonsense than to listen to it.
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As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.
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Life is terrible. It rules us, we do not rule it.
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All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.