Oscar Wilde

“The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.”

“If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me.”

“Nos prometieron que los sueños podrían volverse realidad. Pero se les olvido mencionar que las pesadillas también son sueños.”

“Nunca des explicaciones, tus amigos no las necesitan y tus enemigos no las creen”

“Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building.”

“Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates.”

“There is something in that name that seems to inspire absolute confidence. I pity any poor woman whose husband is not called Ernest.”

“I hope, Cecily, I shall not offend you if I state quite frankly and openly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection.”

“Cei care găsesc înţelesuri frumoase în lucrurile frumoase sunt cei cultivaţi. Pentru aceştia există speranţă. Ei sunt aleşii pentru care lucrurile frumoase înseamnă doar Frumuseţe".”

“People are either charming or tedious.”

“Yet ruled he not long, so great had been his suffering, and so bitter the fire of his testing, for after the space of three years he died. And he who came after him ruled evilly.”

“Would you be in any way offended if I said that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection?”

“It was only in the theatre that I lived.”

“It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting”

“Why didn't you tell me that the only thing worth loving is an actress?”

“It is a vulgar error to suppose that America was ever discovered. It was merely detected.”

“Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!”

“In love, one always begins in deceiving oneself, and one always ends in deceiving others.”

“I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have searched for pleasure.”

“A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.”

“Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.”

“Circumstances should never alter principles!”

“I don't care about the London season! It is too matrimonial. People are either hunting for husbands, or hiding from them.”

“Lord Henry stretched himself out on the divan and laughed. "Yes, I knew you would; but it is quite true, all the same." "Too much of yourself in it! Upon my word, Basil, I didn't know you were so vain; and I really can't see any resemblance between you, with your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves. Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you— well, of course you have an intellectual expression and all that. 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. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful. Your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks. I feel quite sure of that. He is some brainless beautiful creature who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence. Don't flatter yourself, Basil: you are not in the least like him.”

“How extraordinary! I thought you would never care for anything but your art.”“He is all my art to me now.”

“I hope it did not end happily? I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.”

“One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.”

“The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.”

“Nada mudou. Afastada das sombras irreais da noite, ressurge a vida, na sua realidade já conhecida. Devemos retomá-la onde a deixamos e apodera-se de nós o terrível sentimento de continuidade necessária da energia no mesmo círculo monótono de hábitos estereotipados, ou então somos presas de um desejo selvagem de que nossas pálpebras se abram um dia sobre um mundo que tivesse sido refundido nas trevas para o nosso próprio prazer, um mundo onde as coisas apresentariam novas formas e cores, que teria mudado ou que teria outros segredos, um mundo em que o passado ocuparia pouco ou nenhum lugar, em que as lembranças não sobreviveriam sob a forma inconsciente de obrigação ou de pesar, uma vez que a recordação da própria felicidade oferece amarguras, assim como a lembrança do prazer já contém sua dor.”

“Contudo, o mais corajoso dentre nós tem medo de si mesmo. A mutilação do selvagem tem a sua trágica sobrevivência na própria renúncia que corrompe as nossas vidas. Somos todos castigados por nossas renúncias. Cada impulso que tentamos aniquilar germina em nossa mente e nos envenena. Pecando, o corpo se liberta de seu pecado, porque a ação é um meio de purificação. Nada resta então a não ser a lembrança de um prazer ou a volúpia de um remorso. O único meio de livrar-se de uma tentação é ceder a ela. Se lhe resistirmos, as nossas almas ficarão doentes, desejando as coisas que se proibiram a si mesmas, e, além disso, sentirão desejo por aquilo que umas leis monstruosas fizeram monstruoso e ilegal. Já se disse que os grandes acontecimentos têm lugar no cérebro. É no cérebro e somente nele que têm tambem lugar os grandes pecados do mundo.”

“Der Träumer braucht nur den Mond, um sich zurechtzufinden, und zur Strafe sieht er den Morgen schon vor dem Rest der Welt.”

“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.”

“As I lounged in the Park, or strolled down Piccadilly, I used to look at everyone who passed me, and wonder, with mad curiosity, what sort of lives they led. some of them fascinated me. Others filled me with terror.”

“There is something very morbid about modern sympathy with pain.”

“Why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself?”

“The harmony of soul and body - how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, and ideality that is void.”

“Suddenly I found myself face to face with the young man whose personality had so strangely stirred me.”

“You might see nothing in him. I see everything in him.”

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.”

“If I could get back my youth, I'd do anything in the world except get up early, take exercise or be respectable.”

“Art is not a thing. It is a way.”

“What a fuss people make about fidelity!" exclaimed Lord Henry. "Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.”

“the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.”

“I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when one loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.”

“How sad it is!" murmured Dorian Gray with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. "How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June… . If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!”

“The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing.”

“El egoísmo no es vivir como uno desea vivir, es pedir a los demás que vivan como uno quiere vivir.”

“Far away beyond the pine-woods,' he answered, in a low dreamy voice, 'there is a little garden. There the grass grows long and deep, there are the great white stars of the hemlock flower, there the nightingale sings all night long. All night long he sings, and the cold, crystal moon looks down, and the yew-tree spreads out its giant arms over the sleepers.”

“Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are—my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray’s good looks—we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.”

“Los parientes son simplemente gente aburrida, que no tienen ni el más remoto conocimiento de como hay que vivir ni el más leve instinto de cuándo deben morir”