Oscar Wilde

Rugby is a good occasion for keeping thirty bullies far from the center of the city.

He has no enemies, but he is intensely disliked by his friends.

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.

Love is a misunderstanding between two fools.

Misfortunes one can endure--they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults--ah!--there is the sting of life.

This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.

No art ever survived censorship; no art ever will.

Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

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

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

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

It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

The study of law is sublime, and its practice vulgar.

In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.

To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.

It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.

Lady Bracknell. Good afternoon, dear Algernon, I hope you are behaving very well. Algernon. I’m feeling very well, Aunt Augusta. Lady Bracknell. That’s not quite the same thing. In fact the two things rarely go together.

And let me touch those curving claws of yellow ivory; and grasp the tail that like a monstrous asp coils round your heavy velvet paws.

I am sorry my life is so marred and maimed by extravagance. But I cannot live otherwise. I, at any rate, pay the penalty of suffering.