Oscar Wilde Quotes
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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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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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Liberty is the chosen resort of the artistic shopper.
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There are two ways to dislike poetry: One is to dislike it; the other is to read Pope.
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Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.
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Plain women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women never are. They are always so occupied with being jealous of other women's husbands.
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It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.
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Palermo was lovely. The most beautifully situated town in the world - it dreams away its life in the Conca d'Oro, the exquisite valley that lies between two seas. The lemon groves and the orange gardens were entirely perfect.
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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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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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The job of the critic is to report to us his moods.
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One must have some sort of occupation nowadays. If I hadn't my debts I shouldn't have anything to think about.
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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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One can only give an unbiased opinion about things that do not interest one, which is no doubt the reason an unbiased opinion is always valueless. The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing.
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We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone.
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She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy.
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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 was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect.
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Why, what a wonderful piece of luck! Here is a red rose! I have never seen any rose like it in all my life. It is so beautiful that I am sure it has a long Latin name.
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But what world says that I'm wicked? It can only be the next world. This world and I are on excellent terms.
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Writing bores me so.
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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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The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.
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If England treats her criminals the way she has treated me, she doesn't deserve to have any.
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Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood.