Quotes from Oscar Wilde

Even when one has been wounded by it, Harry? asked the duchess after a pause. Especially when one has been wounded by it, answered Lord Henry.

Cada um de nós tem em si o Céu e o Inferno

The books that the world calls immoral books are books that show the world its own shame.

What is the difference between scandal and gossip? Oh! gossip is charming! History is merely gossip, but scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

He was afraid of certainty.

What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst

every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. the sitter is merely the accident, the occasion.

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf. 

No artist has ethical sympathies.

Conversation is one of the loveliest of the arts.

now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion.

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.

The English novels are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. But one should not be too severe on them. They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study.

Was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or was the body really in the soul, as Giordano Bruno thought? The separation of spirit from matter was a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter was a mystery also.

Suffering is one very long moment.

As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there.

I admit that i think it is better to be beautiful then to be good. But on the other hand no one is more ready to admit then i, it is better to be good then ugly.

Entonces el ruiseñor voló sobre el rosal que crecía alrededor del reloj de sol.

Man know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. -Oscar Wilde

Ah! then it must be an illusion. The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance.

real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid.

Gwendolen.  How absurd to talk of the equality of the sexes!  Where questions of self-sacrifice are concerned, men are infinitely beyond us.