Oscar Wilde

The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.

Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous.

I am not at all cynical, I have merely got experience, which, however, is very much the same thing.

I never take any notice to what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.

Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.

Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleance me in the great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.

Well, I don't like your clothes. You look perfectly ridiculous in them. Why on earth don't you go up and change? It's perfectly childish to be in mourning for a man who is actually staying a whole week with you in your house as a guest. I call it grotesque.

Any place you love is the world to you”, explained the pensive Catherine Wheel, who had been attached to an old deal box in early life, and prided herself on her broken heart; “but love is not fashionable any more, the poets have killed it. They wrote so much about that nobody believed them, and I am not surprised. True love suffers, and is silent. I remember myself once- But it is no matter now. Romance is a thing of the past.

But whether I become a believer or remain an agnostic, my belief or disbelief must derive its source from within, not from without. I, myself, must create its symbols. The transcendental is that which produces its own form. I will never discover its secret if I do not find it in my own heart; if I do not possess it already I shall never be able to acquire it.

I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.

There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination, and disobedience its charm.

A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.

Love is not fashionable anymore; the poets have killed it.

Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life...I have put only my talent into my works.

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.

One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.

He wanted to be where no one would know who he was. He wanted to escape from himself.

She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.

Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.

The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.

Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.