Quotes from Oscar Wilde

It can never be necessary to do what is not honourable.

Lo! with a little rod I did but touch the honey of romance — And must I lose a soul's inheritance?

There is the same world for all of us, and good and evil, sin and innocence, go through it hand in hand.  To shut one's eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice.

Those whom the gods love grow young.

If one were to live his life fully and completely were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream.

And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, 'You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise.

The birds that were singing in the dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her.

Down the long and silent street, The dawn, with silver-sandaled feet, Crept like a frightened girl.

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return.

Women treat us [men] like humanity treats gods—they worship us and keep bothering us to do something for them.

The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance.

I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.

He is some brainless, beautiful creature, who should always be here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in the summer when we want something to chill our intelligence.

Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!

The great things of life are what they seem to be, and for that reason, strange as it may sound to you, are often difficult to interpret. But the little things of life are symbols. We receive our bitter lessons most easily through them.

A method of procuring sensations? Do you think then, that a man who has once committed a murder could possibly do the same crime again? Don't tell me that. says Dorian. Oh! anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often, says Lord Henry

You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages.

It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. - Oscar Wilde (Chuck Palahniuk - Pygmy)

The art is nothing without the gift. But the gift is nothing without work.

My friend is not allowed to go out today. I sit by his side and read him passages from his own life. They fill him with surprise. Everyone should keep someone else's diary; I sometimes suspect you of keeping mine.

JACK Your duty as a gentleman calls you back. ALGERNON My duty as a gentleman has never interfered with my pleasures in the smallest degree.

Even men of the noblest possible moral character are extremely susceptible to the influence of the physical charms of others. Modern, no less then Ancient History, supplies us with many most painful examples of what I refer to. If it were not so, indeed, History would be quite unreadable.

Everyone is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling.