Oscar Wilde Quotes
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It is he who has broken the bond of marriage - not I. I only break its bondage.
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If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.
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She is absolutely inadmissible into society. Many a woman has a past, but I am told that she has at least a dozen, and that they all fit.
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So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape.
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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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On the whole, the great success of marriage in the States is due partly to the fact that no American man is ever idle, and partly to the fact that no American wife is considered responsible for the quality of her husband's dinners.
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But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.
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Men are such cowards. They outrage every law in the world and are afraid of the world's tongue.
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My life-my whole life- take it, and do with it what you will. I love you-love you as I have never loved any living thing. From the moment I met you I loved you, loved you blindly, adoringly,madly! You didn't know it then-you know it now.
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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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I don't like compliments, and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean.
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To make a good salad is to be a brilliant diplomatist — the problem is entirely the same in both cases. To know exactly how much oil one must put with one's vinegar.
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Don't imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you.
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All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything, you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of.
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My duty as a gentleman has never interfered with my pleasures in the smallest degree.
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Music is the perfect type of art.
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Be happy, be happy; you shall have your red rose. I will build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with my own heart's-blood. All that I ask of you in return is that you will be a true lover, for Love is wiser than Philosophy, though she is wise, and mightier than Power, though he is mighty.
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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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Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.
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All art is at once surface and symbol.
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Woman's first duty in life is to her dressmaker. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered.
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There can be nothing more frequent than an occasional drink.
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Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play... I tell you, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.
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Rugby is a good occasion for keeping thirty bullies far from the center of the city.