Oscar Wilde

The tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self denial.

The English country-gentleman galloping after a fox — the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.

Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.

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.

It is perfectly monstrous,' he said, at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.

Life cheats us with shadows. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us with bitterness and disappointment in its train.

The very essence of romance is uncertainty.

It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees. It makes life too full of terrors.

Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginitive

If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.

Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.

Jack: Actually, I was found. Lady Bracknell: Found? Jack: Uh, yes, I was in... a handbag. Lady Bracknell: A handbag? Jack: Yes, it was... [makes gestures] Jack: an ordinary handbag.

It's the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

To be popular one must be a mediocrity.