Oscar Wilde

“Man is many things, but he is not rational.”

“we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.”

“My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect---simply a confession of failures. Faithfulness! I must analyse it some day. The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up. But I don't want to interrupt you. Go on with your story. ”

“I am not laughing, Dorian; at least I am not laughing at you. But you should not say the greatest romance of your life. You should say the first romance of your life. You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do. That is the one use of the idle classes of a country. Don't be afraid. There are exquisite things in store for you. This is merely the beginning. ”

“Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.”

“There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.”

“The value of an idea has nothing to do with the honesty of the man expressing it.”

“He seems to read nothing but my books, and says his one desire is to 'follow in my footsteps'! But I have told him that they lead to terrible places.”

“I think after Christmas would be better for publication: I am hardly a Christmas present.”

“I would sooner have fifty unnatural vices than one unnatural virtue. It is unnatural virtue that makes the world, for those who suffer, such a premature Hell.”

“I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts.”

“I await the revises, and promise you not to 'make my quietus with a bare bodkin' till I have returned them. After that, I think of retiring. But first I would like to dine with you here. To leave life as one leaves a feast is not merely philosophy but romance.”

“The unread is always better than the unreadable.”

“I have pleasures, and passions, but the joy of life is gone. I am going under: the morgue yawns for me. I go and look at my zinc-bed there. After all, I had a wonderful life, which is, I fear, over.”

“Christ did not die to save people, but to teach people how to save each other. This is, I have no doubt, a grave heresy, but it is also a fact.”

“My writing has gone to bits - like my character. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain.”

“He has certainly not been paying me compliments. Perhaps that is thereason that I don't believe anything he has told me.”

“Tread Lightly, she is nearUnder the snow,Speak gently, she can hearThe daisies grow.”

“but love is not fashionable anymore, the poets have killed it. They wrote so much about it that nobody believed them, and I am not surprised. True love suffers, and is silent. I remember myself once-but no matter now. Romance is a thing of the past.”

“I don't play accurately--any one can play accurately--but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte. I keep science for Life.”

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.”

“Lean on principles, one day they'll end up giving way.”

“The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. ”

“In America the president reigns for 4 years, and journalism governs for ever and ever.”

“It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man--that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.”

“I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.”

“You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.”

“Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.”

“Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect.”

“To look wise is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier.”

“The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope. When the Verities become acrobats we can judge them.”

“It is sweet to dance to violinsWhen love and life are fair:To dance to flutes, to dance to lutesIs delicate and rare: But it is not sweet with nimble feet To dance upon the air!”

“Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shilly-shallying with the question is absurd. Nor do I in any way approve of the modern sympathy with invalids. I consider it morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. Health is the primary duty of life.”

“I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood. Don't degrade me into the position of giving you useful information. Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”

“Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.”

“Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself.”

“I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose.”

“If one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.”

“Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the sexes.”

“When I was young I thought money was the most important thing in life, now that I'm old - I know it is!”

“Imagination is a quality that was given to man compensate him from whats not. The sense of humor was given to console him from what is.”

“A man who moralizes is a hypocrite, and a woman who does so is invariably plain.”

“There is one thing infinitely more pathetic than to have lost the woman one is in love with, and that is to have won her and found out how shallow she is!”

“One's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders.”

“Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.”

“It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time. Perhaps, as Harry says, a really grande passion is the privilege of those who have nothing to do, and that is the use of the idle classes in a country”

“Rugged and straightforward as he was, there was something in his nature that was purely feminine in its tenderness”

“After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.”

“How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being”

“I love scrapes. They are the only things that are never serious.""Oh, that's nonsense, Algy. You never talk anything but nonsense.""Nobody ever does.”