Oscar Wilde

The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.

I could deny it if I liked. I could deny anything if I liked.

Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval.

It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.

Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither

We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes.

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.

Man is many things, but he is not rational.

You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.

I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.

Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect.

Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself.

After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.

I love scrapes. They are the only things that are never serious." "Oh, that's nonsense, Algy. You never talk anything but nonsense." "Nobody ever does.

If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.

She knew nothing, but she had everything that he had lost.

The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.

Ah! The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women...merely adored.

For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time. That is not such a tragic thing as possibly it sounds to you. To those who are in prison tears are a part of every day's experience. A day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one's heart is hard, not a day on which one's heart is happy.