Quotes from Oscar Wilde

Her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good.

I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.

Any place you love is the world to you.

ever since I met you I have admired you more than any girl...I have ever met since...I met you.

You have filled my tea with lumps of sugar, and though I asked most distinctly for bread and butter, you have given me cake. I am known for the gentleness of my disposition, and the extraordinary sweetness of my nature, but I warn you, Miss Cardew, you may go too far.

Life is too important to be taken seriously.

Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it.

You told me you had destroyed it. I was wrong. It has destroyed me.

Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.

Every impulse we strangle will only poison us.

To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.

A mask tells us more than a face.

I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.

Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.

The great events of the world take place in the brain...

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. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I daresay, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one's life.

The only difference between saints and sinners is that every saint has a past while every sinner has a future.

Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything. Yes, murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; and when they grow older they know it.

Paradox though it may seem - and paradoxes are always dangerous things - it is none the less true that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life.

A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle.

Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure

I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing.

To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.