Oscar Wilde

“The trouble with Marxism is that it takes up too many evenings.”

“But there is no such thing, sir, as a ghost, and I guess the laws of Nature are not going to be suspended for the British aristocracy”

“The world is a stage, but the play is badly written.”

“Se dice que los grandes acontecimientos del mundo tienen lugar en el cerebro. Es en el cerebro, y sólo en el cerebro, donde los grandes pecados del mundo tienen lugar también.”

“La verdad, es la verdad; rara vez pura y nunca simple”

“There are only two ways, as you know, of becoming civilized. One is by being cultured, the other is by being corrupt.”

“Tea is the only simple pleasure left to us.”

“I must confess that most modern mysticism seems to me to be simply a method of imparting useless knowledge in a form that no one can understand”

“It is only about things that do not interest one, that one can give a really unbiassed opinion; and this is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always valueless.”

“Popularität setzt immer Mittelmäßigkeit voraus.”

“And all men kill the thing they love, By all let this be heard,Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word,The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword!”Ballad of Reading Gaol, 1898”

“Genius is born, not paid.”

“I am afraid that woman appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters, all the same. They love being dominated.”

“La experiencia no tiene valor ético alguno, es simplemente el nombre que damos a nuestros errores.”

“I have no ambition to play the part of a mother, and why should I interfere with her illusions? I find it hard enough to keep my own.”

“Are you very much in love with him?' he asked. She did not answer for some time, but stood gazing at the landscape.'I wish I knew' she said at last.He shook his head. -'Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.All ways end at the same point, my dear Gladys.'--'What is that?'-'Disillusion.”

“sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.”

“fantastic shadows of birds”

“Why is it that I can't feel this tragedy as much as I want to?”

“I should fancy that the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial.”

“Leben - es gibt nichts Selteneres auf der Welt. Die meisten Menschen existieren, weiter nichts.”

“Secret to remain young is to have an inordinate passion for pleasure.”

“All trials are trials for one's life.”

“How long could you love a woman who didn't love you, Cecil?A woman who didn't love me? Oh, all my life!”

“I should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.”

“I'll see if I can't make the bitter waters sweet by the intensity of love I bear you”

“Where your life leads you, you must go”

“Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art”

“All art is immortal. For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life.”

“Que hablen mal de uno es terrible. Pero es peor que no lo hagan en absoluto”

“Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us.”

“The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid others might pick them up.”

“It is personalities, not principles, that move the age”

“The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?”

“Sono così intelligente che a volte non capisco una sola parola di quel che sto dicendo.”

“Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life's sores and maladies merely, but with life's joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom.”

“Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is”

“L'inferno e il paradiso sono tutti e due dentro di noi.”

“From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.”

“All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and individualism that is to kill it. When it is used with a certain amount of kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralising. People, in that case, are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is being put on them, and so go through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that they are probably thinking other people's thoughts, living by other people's standards, wearing practically what one may call other people's second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment.”

“He made me see what Life is, and what Death signifies, and why Love is stronger than both.”

“Yet the roses are not less lovely for all that.”

“I suppose because we have no ruins and no curiosities,” said Virginia satirically.”

“You can have your secret as long as I have your heart[.]”

“It is very difficult sometimes to keep awake, especially at church, but there is no difficulty at all about sleeping.”

“It is very wrong to kill any one[.]""Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!”

“We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.”

“Thou knowest all; I seek in vainWhat lands to till or sow with seed -The land is black with briar and weed,Nor cares for falling tears or rain.Thou knowest all; I sit and waitWith blinded eyes and hands that fail,Till the last lifting of the veilAnd the first opening of the gate.Thou knowest all; I cannot see.I trust I shall not live in vain,I know that we shall meet againIn some divine eternity.”

“She is at rest.Peace, peace, she cannot hear,Lyre or sonnet,All my life's buried here,Heap earth upon it.”

“In fact, he was dressed for the character of ‘Jonas the Graveless, or the Corpse-Snatcher of Chertsey Barn,’ one of his most remarkable impersonations”