Quotes from Oscar Wilde

We in the House of Lords are never in touch with public opinion. That makes us a civilised body.

I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.

Because you have the most marvellous youth, and youth is the one thing worth having. I don't feel that, Lord Henry. No, you don't feel it now. Some day, when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly. Now, wherever you go, you charm the world.

They say that love hath a bitter taste.... But what matter? What matter? I have kissed thy mouth.

In love, one always begins in deceiving oneself, and one always ends in deceiving others.

The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. And unselfish people are colourless. They lack individuality.

A pesar de todo, cada hombre mata lo que ama, Para cada uno, oigan esto, Algunos lo hacen con una mirada amarga, Algunos con una palabra adulatoria, El cobarde lo hace con un beso, ¡El hombre valiente con una espada!

To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

I give the truths of tomorrow. I prefer the mistakes of today, she answered.

My dear boy, said Lord Henry, smiling, anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. That is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilized. Civilization is not, by any means, an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which men can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity of being either, so they stagnate.

Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. I hate it.

Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak.... They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.

For these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely house, were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne.

I would sooner lose my best friend than my worst enemy. To have friends, you know, one need only be good-natured; but when a man has no enemy left there must be something mean about him.

Can they feel, I wonder, those white silent people we call the dead?

You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity.

Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes. It is well to have learned that.

Come, I tell you. You have chattered enough about corruption. Now you shall look on it face to face!

A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life.

M. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of Life.

Never trust a woman who wears mauve.

Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.

It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free.

But I loved Narcissus because as he lay on my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw ever my own beauty mirrored.