Oscar Wilde

“What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversitybecame to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was amalady, or a madness, or both.”

“sorrow...is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that oflove touches it”

“The Noblest form of Affection”

“The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. 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.”

“You silly Arthur! If you knew anything about...anything, which you don't, you would know that I adore you. Everyone in London knows it except you. It is a public scandal the way I adore you. I have been going about for the last six months telling the whole of society that I adore you. I wonder you consent to have anything to say to me. I have no character left at all. At least, I feel so happy that I am quite sure I have no character left at all.”

“By the way, Dorian, he (Lord Henry) said, after a pause, what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose - how does the quotation run? - his own soul? ”

“And her sweet red lips on these lips of mineBurned like the ruby fire setIn the swinging lamp of a crimson shrine,Or the bleeding wounds of the pomegranate,Or the heart of the lotus drenched and wetWith the spilt-out blood of the rose-red wine.”

“I've now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.”

“I hope you hair curls naturally, does it?Yes, darling, with a little help from others.”

“If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.”

“Duty is what one expects from others.”

“To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.”

“There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about.”

“I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.”

“I am happy in my prison of passion”

“I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world… And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom.”

“A burnt child loves the fire.”

“Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.”

“Create yourself. Be yourself your poem.”

“What a silly thing love is! It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything and it is always telling one things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true.”

“Good taste is the excuse I've always given for leading such a bad life”

“In every sphere of life, form is the beginning of things. […] Forms are the food of faith, cried Newman in one of those great moments of sincerity that made us admire the know the man. […] The Creeds are believed, not because they are rational, but because they are repeated.”

“I am always late on principle, my principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.”

“Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs.”

“Life is too important to be taken seriously.”

“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.”

“Well, I know, of course, how important it is not to keep a business engagement, if one wants to retain any sense of the beauty of life.”

“It can never be necessary to do what is not honourable.”

“Handeln? Was ist Handeln? Es ist nichts als gemeine Anbequemung an die Tatsachen! Die Welt schafft der Sänger für den Träumer.”

“Ich lese nie ein Werk, das ich besprechen muss. Man lässt sich so leicht beeinflussen.”

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.”

“Irony is wasted on the stupid”

“but the bravest man among us is afraid of himself”

“I want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous.”

“All great ideas are dangerous.”

“He read of the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde that weeps tears of granite in its lonely sunless exile and longs to be back by the hot, lotus-covered Nile.”

“As he passed out, he used to look with wonder at the black confessionals and long to sit in the dim shadow of one of them and listen to men and women whispering through the worn grating the true story of their lives.”

“You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.”

“It is so easy to convince others; it is so difficult to convince oneself.”

“I am the only person I would like to know thoroughly”

“Civilization is not by means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt.”

“If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression that gives reality to things.”

“The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.”

“The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion-these are the two things that govern us.”

“We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.”

“I don’t write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For my own sake I must forgive you.”

“I blame myself without reserve for my weakness. It was merely weakness. One half-hour with Art was always more to me than a cycle with you. Nothing really at any period of my life was ever of the smallest importance to me compared with Art. But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination.”

“Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain.”

“A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.”

“You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages.”