Quotes from Oscar Wilde

Secret to remain young is to have an inordinate passion for pleasure.

People cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the sinful, but the stupid, who are our shame. There is no sin except stupidity.

It is only an auctioneer who should admire all schools of art.

If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different.

artists have sex but art has none

Life at times loses its sense of reality; it appears to us like a weird, optical illusion - a phantasmagoric bubble that will disappear at the slightest breath.

Anything approaching an explanation is always derogatory to a work of art.

I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal—to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be.

And, certainly to him Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation.

No, you don't feel it now. Some day, when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly.

He was like a common gardener walking with a rose.

LADY HUNSTANTON Lord Illingworth, you don't think that uneducated people should be allowed to have votes? LORD ILLINGWORTH I think they are the only people who should.

People are either hunting for husbands, or hiding from them.

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words. That is the reason why I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.

It would be unfair to expect other people to be as brilliant as oneself.

The General was essentially a man of peace, except in his domestic life. 

I can not help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates. Art is always more abstract than we fancy. Form and color tell us of form and color-that is all. It often seems to me that art conceals the artist more completely than it ever reveals hi m

Culture and corruption, echoed Dorian. I have known something of both. It seems terrible to me now that they should ever be found together.

Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent among them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary.

Lord Henry went out to the garden and found Dorian Gray burying his face in the great cool lilac-blossoms, feverishly drinking in their perfume as if it had been wine. He came close to him and put his hand upon his shoulder. You are quite right to do that, he murmured. Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

Better for him that each sin of his life had brought its sure, swift penalty along with it. There was purification in punishment. Not 'Forgive us our sins,' but 'Smite us for our iniquities' should be the prayer of a man to a most just God.

Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out. Whatever influence I ever had over mamma, I lost at the age of three.

I am always astonishing myself. It is the only thing that makes life worth living.

With slouch and swing around the ring We trod the Fools' Parade! We did not care: we knew we were The Devils' Own Brigade: And shaven head and feet of lead Make a merry masquerade.