Oscar Wilde

It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.

If there is anything more annoying in the world than having people talk about you, it is certainly having no one talk about you.

To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.

The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen.

It is sweet to dance to violins When love and life are fair: To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes Is delicate and rare: But it is not sweet with nimble feet To dance upon the air!

It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time. Perhaps, as Harry says, a really grande passion is the privilege of those who have nothing to do, and that is the use of the idle classes in a country

Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything. Yes, murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; and when they grow older they know it.

Young men want to be faithful, and are not. Old men want to be faithless, and cannot.

The supreme vice is shallowness.

A man who takes himself too seriously will find that no one else takes him seriously.

With subtle and finely-wrought temperaments it is always so. Their strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and the sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.

It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.

All the spring may be hidden in the single bud, and the low ground nest of the lark may hold the joy that is to herald the feet of many rose-red dawns.

Art only begins where Imitation ends.

The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart—hearts are made to be broken—but that it turns one’s heart to stone.

sorrow...is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it

You silly Arthur! If you knew anything about...anything, which you don't, you would know that I adore you. Everyone in London knows it except you. It is a public scandal the way I adore you. I have been going about for the last six months telling the whole of society that I adore you. I wonder you consent to have anything to say to me. I have no character left at all. At least, I feel so happy that I am quite sure I have no character left at all.

Duty is what one expects from others.

Good taste is the excuse I've always given for leading such a bad life

It is so easy to convince others; it is so difficult to convince oneself.

The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion-these are the two things that govern us.