Oscar Wilde

Every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character.

I like looking at geniuses and listening to beautiful people.

I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful, and that all beautiful things are made by those who strive to make something useful.

Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilization.

Public Opinion... an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.

I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse.

When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring.

As one reads history ... one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted.

Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.

Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.

Marriage is the one subject on which all women agree and all men disagree.

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.

Dammit Sir, it's your duty to get married. You can't always be living for pleasure!

Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious.

The ugly can be beautiful. The pretty, never.

The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope.

Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. It seeks to show new perspectives and other choices. It is a way to help expand and liberate the consciousness; our experiences, understandings, imaginings, options and thereby our lives.

To shut one's eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice.

One should never make one's entrance with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one's old age.

Only the unimaginative can fail to find a reason for drinking Champagne

The General was essentially a man of peace, except in his domestic life.