Oscar Wilde

“One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.”

“He wanted to be where no one would know who he was. He wanted to escape from himself.”

“The moon in her chariot of pearl”

“She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.”

“They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about. ”

“If one were to live his life fully and completely were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream.”

“Sometime you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such thing as romantic experience; there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance- that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long someday to feel”

“The real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.”

“A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks.”

“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. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.”

“Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.”

“I'm too old to know everything”

“we always misunderstood ourselves, and rarely understood others”

“I beg your pardon I didn't recognise you - I've changed a lot.”

“The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married.”

“To get into the best society, nowadays, one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people - that is all!”

“I won't tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world's voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely—or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. You have that moment now. Choose!”

“A method of procuring sensations? Do you think then, that a man who has once committed a murder could possibly do the same crime again? Don't tell me that." says Dorian."Oh! anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often," says Lord Henry”

“Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.”

“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”

“For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.”

“He wants to enslave you.''I shudder at the thought of being free.”

“Good heavens, I suppose a man may eat his own muffins in his own garden.""But you have just said it was perfectly heartless to eat muffins!""I said it was perfectly heartless of YOU under the circumstances. That is a very different thing.""That may be, but the muffins are the same!”

“One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempré… It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh.”

“En este mundo sólo hay dos tragedias: una es no conseguir lo que deseas y la otra conseguirlo.”

“La risa es la actitud primitiva hacia la vida, una forma de acercamiento que sólo sobrevive en artistas y criminales.”

“I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die.”

“Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.”

“Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly.”

“When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.”

“Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.”

“Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.”

“Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.”

“In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor.”

“There was purification in punishment. Not 'Forgive us our sins,' but 'Smite us for our iniquities' should be the prayer of a man to a most just God.”

“In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you”

“As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.”

“People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.”

“I have been right, Basil, haven’t I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.”

“The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.”

“Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons.”

“What you have told me is quite a romance, a romance of art one might call it, and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.”

“I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be somebody else.”

“Let those who have not walked as we have done,In the red fire of passion, those whose livesAre dull and colourless, in a word let those,If any such there be, who have not loved,Cast stones against you”

“Todo o retrato que é pintado com sentimento é um retrato do artista e não do modelo”

“Cada um de nós tem em si o Céu e o Inferno”

“Os livros que o mundo classifica de imorais são livros que mostram ao mundo a sua própria vergonha”

“The only thing I cannot resist is temptation.”

“Prism! Where is that baby?”

“Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth. The God of this century is wealth. To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must have wealth.”