Quotes from Oscar Wilde

I ask merely for information.

The unfortunate accident—for I like to think it was no more—that you had not yet been able to acquire the "Oxford temper" in intellectual matters, never, I mean, been one who could play gracefully with ideas but had arrived at violence of opinion merely.

My sermon on the meaning of the manna in the wilderness can be adapted to almost any occasion, joyful, or, as in the present case, distressing. [All sigh.] I have preached it at harvest celebrations, christenings, confirmations, on days of humiliation and festal days.

Robert, how could you have sold yourself for money? I did not sell myself for money. I bought success at a great price. That is all.

JACK: I will be back in a few moments, dear Canon. Gwendolen! Wait here for me! GWENDOLEN: If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.

The criminal classes are so close to us that even the policemen can see them.  They are so far away from us that only the poet can understand them.

sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.

Nowadays all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.

Mi bella princesa, your funny little dwarf will never dance again. It is a pity; for he is so ugly that he might have made the King smile. 'But why will he never dance again?' asked the Infanta laughing. "Because his heart is broken", answered the Chamberlain.

Oh! In what a wild hour of madness he had killed his friend! How ghastly the mere memory of the scene! He saw it all again. Each hideous detail came back to him with added horror. Out of the black cave of Time, terrible and swathed in scarlet, rose the image of his sin.

To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them.

past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it.

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating -- people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

People are so annoying. All my pianists look exactly like poets; and all my poets look exactly like pianists.

I felt that this grey, monstrous London of ours, with its myriads of people, its sordid sinners and its splendid sins

What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.  Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.

Why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself?

I cannot sympathize with that. It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores, the better.

The St. James's

He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them.

But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination.

the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.

We live in the age of the over-worked, and under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.

It is a vulgar error to suppose that America was ever discovered. It was merely detected.