Oscar Wilde Quotes
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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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To define is to limit.
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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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Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.
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Biography lends to death a new terror.
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I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes.
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You know what a woman's curiosity is.
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He hadn’t a single redeeming vice.
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The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married. One should always be in love - that's the reason one should never marry.
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There is one thing infinitely more pathetic than to have lost the woman one is in love with, and that is to have won her and found out how shallow she is!
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Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic — a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.
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I feel that if I kept it secret it might grow in my mind (as poisonous things grow in the dark) and take its place with the other terrible thoughts that gnaw me.
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My duty as a gentleman has never interfered with my pleasures in the smallest degree.
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I have a business appointment that I am anxious... to miss.
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This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
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Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.
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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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More women grow old nowadays through the faithfulness of their admirers than through anything else.
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If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners, she doesn't deserve to have any.
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All art is at once surface and symbol.
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Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them.
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You shut out from your society the gentle and the good. You laugh at the simple and the pure. living, as you all do, on other and by them, you need at self-sacrifice, and if you throw bread to the poor, it is merely to keep them quiet for a season.
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An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant as the case may be.
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I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing.