Quotes from Oscar Wilde

The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought and sold and bartered away.

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

She lives the poetry she cannot write.

Indeed, no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.

Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.

My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.

If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression that gives reality to things.

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.

You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

My dear fellow, the truth isn't quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl. What extraordinary ideas you have about the way to behave to a woman!

Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.

With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.

Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

I hope, Cecily, I shall not offend you if I state quite frankly and openly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection.

Everything is going to be fine in the end. If it's not fine it's not the end.

It is better to be beautiful then to be good, but it is better to be good then to be ugly.

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.

I think it's very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone and not be defined by another person.

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.

I can believe anything provided it is incredible.

I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws.

Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.