Quotes from Oscar Wilde

Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. I hate it. Why? said the younger man wearily. Because, said Lord Henry, passing beneath his nostrils the gilt trellis of an open vinaigrette box, one can survive everything nowadays except that.

Le donne ci ispirano il desiderio di far dei capolavori e ci impediscono sempre di eseguirli

The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world... They live as we all should live—undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet... 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.

Faithfulness! I must analyse it some day. The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn't a dentist. It produces a false impression.

Out of the black cave of time, terrible and swathed in scarlet, rose the image of his sin.

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies. And

You come down here to console me. That is charming of you. You find me consoled, and you are furious. How like a sympathetic person!

I can sympathize with everything except suffering. I cannot sympathize with that. It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing.

People used to say of me that I was too individualistic. I must be far more of an individualist than ever I was. I must get far more out of myself than ever I got, and ask far less of the world than ever I asked. Indeed, my ruin came not from too great individualism of life, but from too little. The one disgraceful, unpardonable, and to all time contemptible action of my life was to allow myself to appeal to society for help and protection.

The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us...it is outside the proper sphere of art.

I don't desire to change anything in England except the weather

La insinceridad es un método con que multiplicar nuestras personalidades

You know I am not a champion of marriage. The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. And unselfish people are colourless.

very essence of romance is uncertainty. 

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable. Youth! There is nothing like it.

I have a strange longing for the great simple primeval things, such as the sea, to me no less of a mother than the Earth. It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.

Ordinary women never appeal to one's imagination.They are limited to their century. No glamour every transfigures them. One knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets. One can always find them. There is no mystery in any of them.

What a fuss people make about fidelity!

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live: and unselfishness is letting other people's lives alone, not interfering with them.

They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion--these are the two things that govern us.

When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

She laughed again. Her teeth showed like white seeds in a scarlet fruit.

But there are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely - or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.