Oscar Wilde Quotes
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After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed and mourning over tragedies that were not my own.
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Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
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To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.
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When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her.
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One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.
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Simple pleasures are always the last refuge of the complex.
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We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.
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A beggar hates his benefactor as much as he hates himself for begging.
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The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.
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For an artist to marry his model is as fatal as for a gourmet to marry his cook: the one gets no sittings, and the other gets no dinners.
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How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.
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Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief.
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If only the picture could grow old, and I stay young. For that...for that, I would give my SOUL for that.
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Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.
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I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
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Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
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An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.
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The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
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And once, or twice, to throw the dice is a gentlemanly game, But he does not win who plays with Sin in the secret house of shame.
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I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.
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History is a lie commonly agreed upon.
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To get back one's youth one has merely to repeat one's follies.
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The English have a miraculous power of turning wine into water.
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Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.