Oscar Wilde

“A beautiful woman risking everything for a mad passion. A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous, treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man. Yes, it was an interesting background. It posed the lad, made him more perfect as it were. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”

“Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.”

“We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.”

“No man is rich enough to buy back his past.”

“I must say... that I ruined myself: and that nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand.”

“He hadn’t a single redeeming vice.”

“I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent engagement.”

“The great events of the world take place in the brain...”

“Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.”

“The English country gentleman galloping after the fox – the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable. ”

“The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet’s dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.”

“In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.”

“The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.”

“Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.”

“High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.”

“Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.”

“A poet can survive everything but a misprint.”

“One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.”

“A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.”

“But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.”

“I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.”

“Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.""I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.”

“My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.”

“Memory is the diary we all carry about with us.”

“Nichts Interessantes ist jemals richtig.”

“Wenn eine Frau ihre Fehler nicht charmant begehen kann, ist sie nichts als ein Weib.”

“Natürlich ist die Ehe nur Gewohnheit. Eine schlechte sogar. Aber man bedauert sogar den Verlust der schlechten Gewohnheit. Kann sein, dass man sie sogar am meisten bedauert.”

“Der Mensch hat eine instinktive Angst vor Trieben, die stärker als er selbst erscheinen.”

“das man die wahre Natur der Sinne nie verstanden hatte und dass sie wild und tierisch geblieben waren, nur weil die Welt versucht hatte, sie durch Aushungern zu bändigen und durch schmerzhaften Verzicht abzutöten, statt danach zu trachten, sie zu Elementen einer neuen Geistigkeit zu verwandeln, deren bezeichnendes Merkmal ein empfindsamer Sinn für die Schönheit sein sollte.”

“Die Welt ist von Narren geschaffen, damit Weise in ihr Leben.”

“Die Männer heiraten, weil sie müde sind, die Frauen, weil sie neugierig sind. Beide werden enttäuscht.”

“Für den Philosophen sind die Frauen der Triumph der Materie über den Geist, - genau wie die Männer der Triumph des Geistes über die Moral sind.”

“Kinder lieben ihre Eltern zuerst. Nach einer Weile beurteilen sie sie. Selten, wenn je, verzeihen sie ihnen.”

“Im Krieg machen die Starken die Schwachen zu Sklaven, im Frieden machen die Reichen die Armen zu Sklaven.”

“Wenn ein Mann alt genug ist, um unrecht zu tun, so sollte er alt genug sein, um recht zu tun.”

“Was verabscheuenswerter sei, die Zeichen der Sünde oder die des Alter.”

“Jene Entsagungen, die die Menschen alberner Weise Tugenden nennen”

“Jemanden zu beeinflussen bedeutet, ihm eine fremde Seele zu geben.”

“Genie währt länger als Schönheit.”

“It is perfectly monstrous,' he said, at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.”

“If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners, she doesn't deserve to have any.”

“Life cheats us with shadows. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us with bitterness and disappointment in its train.”

“One should always be a little improbable.”

“Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness.”

“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.”

“It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees. It makes life too full of terrors.”

“The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”

“A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.”

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

“It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world”