Quotes from Oscar Wilde

The secret seems to be the only way to become mysterious and wonderful modern life. The commonest thing gets a touch fascinating when done on the sly.

No one survives being over-estimated, nor is there any surer way of destroying an author's reputation than to glorify him without judgement and to praise him without tact.

I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage:

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal. But there is no literary public in England for anything except newspapers, primers, and encyclopaedias. Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the beauty of literature.

I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me before.

Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others. One's own life—that is the important thing. As for the lives of one's neighbours, if one wishes to be a prig or a Puritan, one can flaunt one's moral views about them, but they are not one's concern. Besides, individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.

If a woman wants to hold a man she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him.

L'inferno e il paradiso sono tutti e due dentro di noi.

How alone I am in life! How terribly alone!

Bana bunu yok ettiÄŸini söylemiÅŸtin. Yanl?? söylemiÅŸim. O beni yok etti.

If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened.

Outside the family circle, papa, I'm glad to say, is entirely unknown. I think that is quite as it should be. The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man.

Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil, cried Dorian with a wild gesture of despair.

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure.

The truth is rarely pure

Adevarul despre casatorie este acela ca te face sa nu mai fi egoist. Iar oamenii lipsiti de egoism sun incolori. Le lipseste individualitatea

One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.

Oh, I like tedious, practical subjects. What I don't like are tedious, practical people. There is a wide difference.

If you are not too long, I will wait for you all my life.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the ocassion. It is not he who is revelead by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas , reveals himself.

Our weakest motives were those of whose nature we were conscious. It often happened that when we thought we were experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves.

Why can't you be like the Happy Prince?" asked a sensible mother of her little boy who was crying for the moon. "The Happy Prince never dreams of crying for anything.

Soul and body, body and soul--how mysterious they were! There was animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality.