Oscar Wilde

“Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.”

“It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.”

“As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her daughter, she is perfectly satisfied”

“Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.”

“Just because a man has died for it, does not make it true.”

“I don't like compliments, and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean.”

“Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failures.”

“Men know life too early. Women know life too late. That is the difference between men and women.”

“One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.”

“A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle.”

“Paradox though it may seem - and paradoxes are always dangerous things - it is none the less true that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life.”

“How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?”

“Miss Prism: Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days. Cecily: Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily? I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much. Miss Prism: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.”

“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”

“She is a peacock in everything but beauty!”

“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

“Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level.”

“America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.”

“There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.”

“There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.”

“I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.”

“I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.”

“Arguments are to be avoided, they are always vulgar and often convincing.”

“Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious”

“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”

“I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about it's use. It is hitting below the intellect.”

“Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.”

“I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.”

“A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.”

“The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.”

“It takes great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it.”

“Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.”

“It is a curious fact that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously”

“It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.”

“Life is too short to learn German”

“Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.”

“For he who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die.”

“The worst of it is that I am perpetually being punished for nothing; this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me. It's perfectly awful to let the mind grind itself away between the upper and nether millstones of regret and remorse without respite; with books my life would be livable -- any life.”

“Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.”

“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.”

“Every woman is a rebel.”

“In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.”

“You seem to forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.”

“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.”

“And alien tears will fill for him pity's long broken urn. For his mourners will all be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn.”

“Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.”

“I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do - the day after.”

“Its a beautiful woman's fate to be the subject of conversation where ever she goes”

“Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.”

“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”