Quotes from Oscar Wilde

Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament. It makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.

Wenn ein Mann alt genug ist, um unrecht zu tun, so sollte er alt genug sein, um recht zu tun.

Im Krieg machen die Starken die Schwachen zu Sklaven, im Frieden machen die Reichen die Armen zu Sklaven.

There are only two ways, as you know, of becoming civilized. One is by being cultured, the other is by being corrupt.

It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't.

He was prisoned in thought. Memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away.

Humph! tell your Aunt Agatha, Harry, not to bother me any more with her charity appeals. I am sick of them. Why, the good woman thinks that I have nothing to do but to write cheques for her silly fads." "All right, Uncle George, I'll tell her, but it won't have any effect. Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.

By the way, is there any difference between 'grey' and 'gray'? I believe there is, but I don't know what it is. In one place in the poem Smithers suggests 'gray'. In others he leaves 'grey'. Perhaps he is seeing red. I believe they are sympathetic colours in spectroscope investigations.

The world is cruel, give me thy heart to take with me.

Do you smoke? Jack.  Well, yes, I must admit I smoke. Lady Bracknell.  I am glad to hear it.  A man should always have an occupation of some kind.  There are far too many idle men in London as it is. 

The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play.

The picture, changed or unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of conscience.

El único modo de librarnos de la tentación es ceder a ella.

The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is.

Yes, continued Lord Henry, that is one of the great secrets of life-- to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul. You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

Atunci cand zeii vor sa-i pedepseasca pe oameni, le indeplinesc dorintele.

You should treat the trivial things in life seriously and the serious things in life with a sincere and studied triviality

Some red star had come too close to the earth.

You cut life to pieces with your epigrams.

For lo, what changes time can bring! The cycles of revolving years May free my heart from all its fears, And teach my lips a song to sing. Before yon field of trembling gold Is garnered into dusty sheaves, Or ere the autumn's scarlet leaves Flutter as birds adown the wold, I may have run the glorious race, And caught the torch while yet aflame, And called upon the holy name Of Him who now doth hide His face. ARONA.

Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul?

I turned halfway round, and saw Dorian Gray for the first time. When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.

My heart stole back across wide wastes of years To One who wandered by a lonely sea, And sought in vain for any place of rest: 'Foxes have holes, and every bird its nest. I, only I, must wander wearily, And bruise my feet, and drink wine salt with tears.' Poem:

To realise one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.