Quotes from Oscar Wilde

We did not dare to breathe a prayer, Or give our anguish scope. Something was dead within each of us, And what was dead was Hope.

They are more cunning than practical. When they make up their ledger, they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy.

We live in a world when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.

Though your sins be as scarlet, yet I will make them as white as snow.

People who shout so loud, my lords, do nothing; the only men I fear are silent men

Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. 

Practice precedes perfection.

Girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it right.

Yes: the public is wonderfully tolerant.  It forgives everything except genius. 

I have known everything, said Lord Henry, with a tired look in his eyes, but I am always ready for a new emotion.

The people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. (...) Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failures

it is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't.  More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

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. That is all that can be said for them. They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.

If this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without one, if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the world.

The Philistine element in life is not the failure to understand art. Charming people, such as fishermen, shepherds, ploughboys, peasants and the like, know nothing about art, and are the very salt of the earth. He is the Philistine who upholds and aids the heavy, cumbrous, blind, mechanical forces of society, and who does not recognise dynamic force when he meets it either in a man or a movement.

That awful thing, a woman's memory!

For romantic young people like he is, the world always looks best at a distance; and a prison where one's allowed to order one's own dinner is not at all bad.

I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

And the trees were so glad to have the children back again that they had covered themselves with blossoms, and were waving their arms gently above the children's heads. 

The rich would have spoken on the value of thrift and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour.

I know you will laugh at me, he replied, but I really can't exhibit it. I have put too much of myself into it.

Are all men bad? Oh, all of them, my dear, all of them, without any exception. And they never grow any better. Men become old, but they never become good.

Though forgiveness was impossible, forgetfulness was possible still, and he was determined to forget

Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shilly-shallying with the question is absurd. Nor do I in any way approve of the modern sympathy with invalids. I consider it morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. Health is the primary duty of life.