Oscar Wilde Quotes
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The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance. The only thing that can console one for being rich is economy.
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The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance.
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It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone.
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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 best way to make children good is to make them happy.
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Alone, and without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.
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What is said of a man is nothing. The point is, who says it.
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Only the shallow know themselves.
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For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.
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The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth.
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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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I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.
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I could deny it if I liked. I could deny anything if I liked.
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She lives the poetry she cannot write.
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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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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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The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me.
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If people were meant to be nude, they would have been born this way.
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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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It is a much cleverer thing to talk nonsense than to listen to it.
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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.
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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.