Quotes from Oscar Wilde

Genie währt länger als Schönheit.

It is only the sacred things that are worth touching, Dorian

A cold rain began to fall, and the blurred street-lamps looked ghastly in the dripping mist.

And each man kills the thing he loves.

The post on her left was occupied by Mr. Erskine of Treadley, an old gentleman of considerable charm and culture, who had fallen, however, into bad habits of silence, having, as he explained once to Lady Agatha, said everything that he had to say before he was thirty.

For the future let those who come to play with me have no hearts

Skepticism is the beginning of faith.

A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on.

it is a marvel that those red-roseleaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing.

As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested. If you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it.

The pure and simple truth is, the truth is never pure and simple.

He was trying to gather up the scarlet threads of life and weave them into a pattern; to find his way through the sanguine labyrinth of passion through which he was wandering.

I don't think now that people can be divided into the good and the bad, as though they were two separate races or creations. What are called good women may have terrible things in them, mad moods of recklessness, assertion, jealousy, sin. Bad women. as they are termed, may have in them sorrow, repentence, pity, sacrifice.

I suppose because we have no ruins and no curiosities," said Virginia satirically.

How dreadful! cried Lord Harry. I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.

In America the president reigns for 4 years, and journalism governs for ever and ever.

I can sympathise with everything, except suffering, cried Lord Harry, Shrugging his shoulders. I cannot sympathise with that. It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves.  The Greeks were quite right there.  Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible.  Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising.  On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. 

We lose too soon, and only find delight In withered husks of some dead memory.

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

The wind shook some blossoms from the trees, and the heavy lilac blooms, with their clustering stars, moved to and fro in the languid air. A grasshopper began to chirp by the wall, and like a blue thread a long, thin dragonfly floated past on its brown gauze wings. Lord Henry felt as if he could hear Basil Hallward's heart beating, and wondered what was coming.

One should never take sides in anything, Mr. Kelvil. Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore.

So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape (...)