Quotes from Oscar Wilde

When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy.

I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.

A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks.

It is perfectly monstrous,' he said, at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.

You have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid.

Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can't get into it do that.

Popularity is the one insult I have never suffered.

Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed.

nothing that is worth knowing can be taught

I never change, except in my affections.

To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.

My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.

It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.

You are more to me than any of them has any idea; you are the atmosphere of beauty through which I see life; you are the incarnation of all lovely things...I think of you day and night. ~ Letter to Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtures are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.

As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her daughter, she is perfectly satisfied

There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself. I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted.

The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.

Memory is the diary we all carry about with us.

People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.

Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginitive

Beauty is a form of Genius--is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.