Quotes from Oscar Wilde

Her ivory hands on the ivory keys Strayed in a fitful fantasy, Like the silver gleam when the poplar trees Rustle their pale leaves listlessly, Or the drifting foam of a restless sea When the waves show their teeth in the flying breeze.

Life is a great disappointment.

I can write no stately proem As a prelude to my lay; From a poet to a poem I would dare to say. For if of these fallen petals One to you seem fair, Love will waft it till it settles On your hair. And when wind and winter harden All the loveless land, It will whisper of the garden, You will understand.

ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world.

La tragedia de la vejez no consiste en ser viejo, sino en haber sido joven.

Sweet, there is nothing left to say But this, that love is never lost

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, History would have been different.

Really, if the lower orders don't set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them?  They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility.

I often wonder what would have happened to those in pain if, instead of Christ, there had been a Christian.

Look at the moon. How strange the moon seems! She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for dead things.

They have been through the fire, and what fire does not destroy, it hardens. She has had experiences.

The Americans are an extremely interesting people. They are absolutely reasonable. I think that is their distinguishing characteristic...I assure you there is no nonsense about the Americans.

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.

Between men and women there is no friendship possible.  There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship. 

The only things that one can use in fiction are the things that one has ceased to use in fact.

To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements.  They give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.

There are three kinds of despots.  There is the despot who tyrannises over the body.  There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul.  There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul and body alike.  The first is called the Prince.  The second is called the Pope.  The third is called the People.  The Prince may be cultivated. 

Lots of people act well, but very few people talk well, which shows that talking is much the more difficult thing of the two, and much the finer thing also.

passion makes one think in a circle

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public.  Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame. It will be to each man what he is himself. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

I shall write it in my diary to-night What? That a burnt child loves the fire

But women who have common sense are so curiously plain, father, aren't they? Of course I only speak from hearsay. No woman, plain or pretty, has any common sense at all, sir. Common sense is the privilege of our sex. Quite so. And we men are so self-sacrificing that we never use it, do we, father?

Ones own soul, and the passions of one's friends—those were the fascinating things in life.