Quotes from Oscar Wilde

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

She knew nothing but she had everything he had lost.

I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about it's use. It is hitting below the intellect.

One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.

I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

Truth is independent of facts always.

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

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

What men call the shadow of the body is not the shadow of the body, but is the body of the soul.

Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.

One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

Just because a man has died for it, does not make it true.

Art only begins where Imitation ends.

Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women.' 'It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees. It makes life too full of terrors.

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring.

Do you smoke? Well, yes, I must admit I smoke. I'm glad to hear of it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind.

My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.

My dear boy, the people who only love once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failures.

It's the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.