Oscar Wilde Quotes
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True contentment is not having everything, but in being satisfied with everything you have.
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It is always painful fo part from people whom one has known for a very brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity. But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable.
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I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.
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Conscience and cowardice are really the same things. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.
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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.
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It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.
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Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things. There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. The thin beaten-out leaf of tremulous gold that chronicles the direction of forces the eye cannot see is in comparison coarse. It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it, and even then must bleed again, though not in pain.
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Nothing is good in moderation. You cannot know good in anything until you have torn the heart out of it by excess.
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The only real people are the people who never existed.
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In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor.
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Liberty is the chosen resort of the artistic shopper.
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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.
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Freedom, individualism and being yourself so long as you don't hurt another's physical person or property: The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself.
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When I am in trouble, eating is the only thing that consoles me. Indeed, as any one who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink. At the present moment I am eating muffins because I am unhappy. Besides, I am particularly fond of muffins.
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To drift with every passion till my soulIs a stringed lute on which all winds can play, Is it for this that I have given away Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll Scrawled over on some boyish holiday With idle songs for pipe and virelay, Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
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To have friends, you know, one need only be good-natured; but when a man has no enemy left there must be something mean about him.
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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.
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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.
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What is abnormal in Life stands in normal relations to Art. It is the only thing in Life that stands in normal relations to Art.
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And when wind and winter harden All the loveless land, It will whisper of the garden, You will understand.
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To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger; and danger has become so rare in modern life.
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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.
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Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.
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Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan, and sail 'round the high-pooped galleys... Dragons will wander about the waste places, and the phoenix will soar from her nest of fire into the air. We shall lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the toad's head. Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand in our stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happen, of things that are not and that should be.