Oscar Wilde

“What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.American novels, answered Lord Henry.”

“Dear Prince, I must leave you, but I will never forget you, and next spring I will bring you back two beautiful jewels in place of those you have given away. The ruby shall be redder than a red rose, and the sapphire shall be as blue as the great sea.”

“Young men want to be faithful, and are not. Old men want to be faithless, and cannot.”

“I had been foolish in imagining that I had seen anything in it, more than that you were extremely good looking, and that I could paint.”

“The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.”

“Genius lasts longer than beauty”

“What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise”

“When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.”

“They take their punishment so well, so cheerfully: I go out with an adder in my heart, and an asp in my tongue, and every night I sow thorns in the garden of my soul.”

“I must remember that a good friend is a new world.”

“Really the answers I get are idiotic. The entire correspondence of you and Robbie with me should be published. The best title would be Letters from Two Idiots to a Lunatic, I should fancy.”

“Well, I can’t help going to see Sibyl play, even if it is only for an act. I get hungry for her presence; and when I think of the wonderful soul that is hidden away in that little ivory body, I am filled with awe.""You can dine with me to-night, Dorian, can’t you?"He shook his head. "To night she is Imogen," he answered, "and tomorrow night she will be Juliet.""When is she Sibyl Vane?""Never.""I congratulate you.”

“Bad artists always admire each others work.”

“I forget what killed it. I think it was her proposing to sacrifice the whole world for me. That is always a dreadful moment. It fills one with the terror of eternity.”

“People say sometimes that Beauty is superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

“Beauty is a form of Genius--is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.”

“The only difference between saints and sinners is that every saint has a past while every sinner has a future. ”

“The supreme vice is shallowness.”

“It's tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man', says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their life is a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

“She had a passion for secrecy, but she herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret.”

“A man who takes himself too seriously will find that no one else takes him seriously.”

“My dear Algy, you talk exactly as if you were a dentist. It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn't a dentist. It produces false impression”

“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.”

“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, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.”

“Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities”

“There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community”

“I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question - simple curiosity.”

“A kiss may ruin a human life”

“I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit.”

“Biography lends to death a new terror.”

“Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at. My gods dwell in temples made with hands; and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made perfect and complete: too complete, it may be, for like many or all of those who have placed their heaven in this earth, I have found in it not merely the beauty of heaven, but the horror of hell also.”

“When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.”

“With subtle and finely-wrought temperaments it is always so. Their strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and the sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude. ”

“Besides, if Hans came here, he might ask me to let him have some flour on credit, and that I could not do. Flour is one thing, and friendship is another, and they should not be confused. Why, the words are spelled differently, and mean quite different things. Everyone can see that.”

“Nossos dias são muito curtos para que tomemos, nos próprios ombros, o peso dos erros de outrem. Cada um vive a própria vida, e paga o preço de vivê-la. Em tudo, a única pena é que, com frequência, temos que pagar um preço alto por uma única falta. E, na verdade, estamos sempre a pagar. No trato com o homem, o Destino jamais encerra as contas.Há momentos, dizem-nos os psicólogos, quando a paixão pelo pecado, ou por aquilo que o mundo chama de pecado, domina de tal maneira uma personalidade, que toda fibra do corpo, e toda célula do cérebro, parece ser instinto com impulsos receosos. Nestes momentos, homens e mulheres perdem a liberdade da vontade. Como autômatos, consciência, morta, ou então, se conseguir viver, vive apenas para dar fascínio à revolta, e encanto a desobediência. Pois todos os pecados, como não se cansam de nos lembrar os teólogos, são pecados da desobediência. Quando, dos céus, cai o espírito maior, a estrela matutina do mal, é como rebelde que cai.”

“I tremble with pleasure when Ithink that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum andthe lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other tossthe pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me.”

“It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. I discern great sanity in the Greek attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on the grass were really mauve or not. But they saw that the sea was for the swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the runner. They loved the trees for the shadow that they cast, and the forest for its silence at noon.”

“All the spring may be hidden in the single bud, and the low ground nest of the lark may hold the joy that is to herald the feet of many rose-red dawns.”

“Art only begins where Imitation ends.”

“Every one is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is asacrament that should be taken kneeling.”

“Some six weeks agoI was allowed by the doctor to have white bread to eat instead of the coarseblack or brown bread of ordinary prison fare. It is a great delicacy. It willsound strange that dry bread could possibly be a delicacy to any one. To meit is so much so that at the close of each meal I carefully eat whatever crumbsmay be left on my tin plate, or have fallen on the rough towel that one usesas a cloth so as not to soil one’s table; and I do so not from hunger—I getnow quite sufficient food—but simply in order that nothing should bewasted of what is given to me. So one should look on love.”

“The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart—hearts are made to be broken—but that it turns one’s heart to stone.”

“What the artist isalways looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body areone and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: inwhich form reveals.”

“The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.”

“between the famous and the infamous there is but one step, if as muchas one”

“Society takes upon itself the right to inflictappalling punishment on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice ofshallowness, and fails to realise what it has done. When the man’s punishmentis over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at thevery moment when its highest duty towards him begins. It is really ashamedof its own actions, and shuns those whom it has punished, as people shun acreditor whose debt they cannot pay, or one on whom they have inflictedan irreparable, an irremediable wrong.”

“To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.”

“I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws.”

“When you really want love, you will find it waiting for you.”

“I believe I am to have enough to live on for about eighteen months at anyrate, so that if I may not write beautiful books, I may at least read beautifulbooks; and what joy can be greater?”