Quotes from Oscar Wilde

Details are always vulgar

It is personalities, not principles, that move the age

It is simply expression, as Henry says, that gives reality to things.

I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when one loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.

People die of common sense

Io dispenso sempre buoni consigli... non saprei cosa farmene altrimenti.

That's an awful thing,a womans memory

At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.

I have also learnt sympathy with suffering. To me, suffering seems now a sacramental thing, that makes those whom it touches holy.

You have not realized how I have developed. I was a schoolboy when you knew me. I am a man now. I have new passions new thoughts new ideas. I am different but you must not like me less. I am changed but you must always be my friend.

The world loves the Saint, and Christ loves the sinner.

It is only intellectually lost who ever argue.

Indeed, in many respects, she was quite English, and was an excellent example of the fact that we have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching; to Parnassus there is no primer and nothing that one can learn is ever worth learning.

We all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.

What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts.

One can realise a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet. 

It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us. Our weakest motives were those of whose nature we were conscious. It often happened that when we thought we were experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves.

Yet the roses are not less lovely for all that.

MRS ALLONBY You have your looking-glass LORD ILLINGWORTH It is unkind. I merely shows me my wrinkles. MRS ALLONBY Mine is better behaved. It never tells me the truth. LORD ILLINGWORTH Then it is in love with you.

When they make up their ledger, they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy.

I should be sorry to be on the same level as an age like this.

It is only about things that do not interest one, that one can give a really unbiassed opinion; and this is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always valueless.

To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.