Oscar Wilde

“I am not at all cynical, I have merely got experience, which, however, is very much the same thing. ”

“If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.”

“Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring.”

“Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.”

“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.”

“Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.”

“Now produce your explanation and pray make it improbable.”

“Her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good.”

“I never take any notice to what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.”

“Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.”

“When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss Money”

“Una rosa se despertó en su sangre y ensombreció sus mejillas. Un agitado aliento separó los pétalos de sus labios, que temblaron. Sobre ella sopló algún viento sur de pasión y movió los delicados pliegos de su vestido”

“Good heavens! how marriage ruins a man! It's as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.”

“There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”

“I'm a man of simple tastes. I'm always satisfied with the best.”

“Wer nicht auf seine Weise denkt, denkt überhaupt nicht.”

“Love is easily killed.”

“Experience is a question of instinct about life.”

“They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever.”

“Every woman becomes their mother. That's their tragedy. And no man becomes his. That's his tragedy.”

“The fatal errors of life are not due to man's being unreasonable: an unreasonable moment may be one's finest moment. They are due to man's being logical.”

“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. ”

“I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.”

“Olvidar un hecho, es modificar el pasado.”

“Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to.”

“American girls are as clever at concealing their parents as English women are at concealing their past.”

“I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal—to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. 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 ride of temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it is forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.”

“There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candour of youth was there, as well as youth's passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world.”

“I know he likes me. Of course I flatter him dreadfully. I find a strange pleasure in saying things to him that I know I shall be sorry for having said...Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to someone who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day.”

“I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.”

“I will not bare my soul to their shallow prying eyes. My heart shall never be put under their microscope.”

“My dear fellow, I am not quite serious. But I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.”

“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. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I daresay, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one's life.”

“What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion.”

“Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.”

“The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.”

“Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”

“With slouch and swing around the ringWe trod the Fools’ Parade!We did not care: we knew we wereThe Devils’ Own Brigade:And shaven head and feet of leadMake a merry masquerade.”

“Pleasure is the only thing one should live for, nothing ages like happiness.”

“Industry is the root of all ugliness.”

“For one moment our lives met, our souls touched.”

“Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan, and sail 'round the high-pooped galleys... Dragons will wander about the waste places, and the phoenix will soar from her nest of fire into the air. We shall lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the toad's head. Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand in our stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happen, of things that are not and that should be.”

“To be good is to be in harmony with ones self. Discord is to be forces to be in harmony with others.”

“Well, I don't like your clothes. You look perfectly ridiculous in them. Why on earth don't you go up and change? It's perfectly childish to be in mourning for a man who is actually staying a whole week with you in your house as a guest. I call it grotesque.”

“Life is short, art is infinite.”

“The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all.”

“The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.  What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.”

“The ages live in history through their anachronisms.”

“The silver trumpets rang across the Dome;The people knelt upon the ground with awe;And borne upon the necks of men I saw,Like some great God, the Holy Lord of Rome.Priest-like, he wore a robe more white than foam,And, king-like, swathed himself in royal red,Three crowns of gold rose high upon his head;In splendour and in light the Pope passed home.My heart stole back across wide wastes of yearsTo One who wandered by a lonely sea;And sought in vain for any place of rest:“Foxes have holes, and every bird its nest,I, only I, must wander wearily,And bruise my feet, and drink wine salt with tears.”

“I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I'll certainly try to forget the fact.”