Quotes from Oscar Wilde

As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.

There seemed to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance

LADY BRACKNELL: It is my last reception, and one wants something that will encourage conversation, particularly at the end of the season when every one has practically said whatever they had to say, which, in most cases, was probably not much.

Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

How exquisite life had once been! How gorgeous in its pomp and decoration! Even to read of the luxury of the dead was wonderful.

The one charm of the past is that it is past.

thing we ask a servant for is a testimonial to honesty, sobriety and industry; for we soon find out that these are the scarce things, and that geniuses and clever people are as common as rats.

La bigamia è avere una moglie di troppo. La monogamia lo stesso.

No one cares about distant relatives nowadays. They went out of fashion years ago.

But she would have soon found out that you were absolutely indifferent to her. And when a woman finds that out about her husband, she either becomes dreadfully dowdy, or wears very smart bonnets that some other woman's husband has to pay for.

No escribo esta carta para poner amargura en tu corazón, sino para arrancarla del mío.

There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral - immoral from the scientific point of view.

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them. His

But the world might guess it; and I will not bare my soul to their shallow, prying eyes. My heart shall never be put under their microscope. There is too much of myself in the thing, Harry--too much of myself!

the poet must sing, and the sculptor think in bronze, and the painter make the world a mirror for his moods, as surely and as certainly as the hawthorn must blossom in spring, and the corn turn to gold at the harvest-time, and the moon in her ordered wanderings change from shield to sickle, and from sickle to shield.

Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art.

In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, an so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man - that is the modern ideal.

There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses. But this was not one of them.

Friendship is a two way street not a one way road.

Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

I don't want to earn my living; I want to live.

I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.

Never love anybody who treats you like you're ordinary.