Quotes from Oscar Wilde

Tea is the only simple pleasure left to us.

Love is a wonderful thing. It is more precious than emeralds and dearer than fine opals. pearls and pomegranates cannot buy it, nor is it set forth in the market-place. It may not be purchased of the merchants, nor can it be weighted out in the balance for gold.

Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. Health is the primary duty of life.

Are there not books that make us live more in one single hour than life can make us live in a score of shameful years?

To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.

The more he knew, the more he desired to know. He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them.

I forgot that little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has someday to cry aloud on the housetops.

The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it. If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. They are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art.

I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.

I see that any materialism in life coarsens the soul, and that the hunger of the body and the appetites of the flesh desecrate always, and often destroy.

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.

Your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks.

Of course, married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.

You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise.

There is an unknown land full of strange flowers and subtle perfumes, a land of which it is joy of all joys to dream, a land where all things are perfect and poisonous.

As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested.

And they are unjust to us often, for when they find life bitter they blame us for it, and when they find it sweet we do not taste its sweetness with them.

I remembered what you had said to me on that wonderful evening we first dined together, about the search for beauty being the real secret of life…

For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses.

And when you are away, Gerald...with...her - oh, think of me sometimes. Don't forget me.

we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.

for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

something was dead in each of us, and what was dead was hope.

we can't stand other people having the same faults as ourselves