Quotes from Oscar Wilde

Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are—my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks—we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.

That certainly seems a satisfactory explanation, does it not? – Yes dear, if you can believe him. – I don't. But that does not affect the wonderful beauty of his answer.

And unselfish people are colourless. They lack individuality.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the only thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

Looking good and dressing well is a necessity. Having a purpose in life is not.

It is strange,' the bird said. 'It is very cold, but I feel quite warm.' 'That is because you have done a good thing,' said the prince.

Everyone is brilliant at breakfast.

What a laugh she had!--just like a thrush singing. And how pretty she had been in her cotton dresses and her large hats! She knew nothing, but she had everything that he had lost.

The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candour of youth was there, as well as youth's passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world.

Threads snap. You would lose your way in the labyrinth.

But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to stave them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic.

There was something tragic in a friendship so colored by romance.

the secrets of art are best learned in secret, and that Beauty, like Wisdom, loves the lonely worshipper.

I would sooner say, or hear it said of me, that I was so typical a child of my age, that in my perversity, and for that perversity`s sake, I turned the good things of my life to evil, and the evil things of my life to good.

Ah! Happy they whose hearts can break And peace of pardon win! How else may man make straight his path And cleanse his soul from sin? How else but through a broken heart May the Lord Christ enter in?

I can sympathize with everything except suffering, said Lord Henry, shrugging his shoulders. I cannot sympathize with that. It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores, the better.

Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour.

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey

If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me.

The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.