Oscar Wilde

“Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.”

“Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.”

“It takes great courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it. And even more courage to see it in the one you love”

“Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away. ”

“I have no objection to anyone’s sex life as long as they don’t practice it in the street and frighten the horses.”

“The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.”

“You, who know all the secrets of life, tell me how to charm Sibyl Vane to love me! I want to make Romeo jealous, I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain. My God, Harry, how I worship her!”

“Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.”

“I could deny it if I liked. I could deny anything if I liked.”

“As he looked back upon man moving through History, he was haunted by a feeling of loss. So much had been surrendered! and to such little purpose!...Hedonism... was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is but itself a moment. ”

“Life is not governed by will or intention. 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 sublte memories with it, a line 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.”

“Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval.”

“The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.”

“Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. 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.”

“Life is one fool thing after another whereas love is two fool things after each other.”

“In America, the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefit of their inexperience.”

“How does one cure the soul? Through the senses”

“My great mistake, the fault for which I can’t forgive myself, is that one day I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my own individuality. ”

“You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.”

“What of Art?-It is a malady.--Love?-An Illusion.--Religion?-The fashionable substitute for Belief.--You are a sceptic.-Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.--What are you?-To define is to limit.”

“Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.”

“Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.”

“Thin-lipped wisdom spoke at her from the worn chair, hinted at prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose author apes the name of common sense.”

“It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.”

“Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither”

“Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.”

“The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”

“All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon.”

“I suppose in about fortnight we shall be told that he has been seen in San Francisco. It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world.”

“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.”

“I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.”

“One of the great secrets of life. Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense and discover too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.”

“If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.”

“The art is nothing without the gift. But the gift is nothing without work.”

“It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.”

“We have quite the same ideas. No; I think our ideas are quite different. But he has been most pleasant.”

“There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself. I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted.”

“La sigaretta è il perfetto campione del piacere. È squisita e ti lascia insoddisfato. Che puoi desiderare di meglio?”

“We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.”

“Everyone is brilliant at breakfast.”

“If there is anything more annoying in the world than having people talk about you, it is certainly having no one talk about you.”

“Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it.”

“Marriage is hardly a thing that one can do now and then, Harry. Except in America, rejoined Lord Henry, languidly.”

“Да,в наше време за всичко плащаме твърде скъпо.Според мен истинската трагедия на бедните е,че могат да си позволят единствено себеотрицанието.Красивите грехове,както и повечето други красиви неща,са привилегия на богатите”

“To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.”

“Jack? . . . No, there is very little music in the name Jack, if any at all, indeed. It does not thrill. It produces absolutely no vibrations . . . I have known several Jacks, and they all, without exception, were more than usually plain. Besides, Jack is a notorious domesticity for John! And I pity any woman who is married to a man called John. She would probably never be allowed to know the entrancing pleasure of a single moment’s solitude. The only really safe name is Ernest.”

“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”

“Well I won't argue about the matter. You always want to argue about things.That is exactly what things were originally made for.”

“To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.”

“You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter - a girl brought up with the utmost care - to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel?”