Quotes from Oscar Wilde

How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.

After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.

One should always play fair when one has the winning cards.

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.

If one plays good music, people don't listen and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

[On Leadville:] Over the piano was printed a notice: Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.

The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.

He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise.

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.

In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.

Lord Illingworth: The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden.Mrs. Allonby: It ends with Revelations.

There is luxury in self-reproach.... When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.

One's real life is often the life that one does not lead.

A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?

Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.

What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.

As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.

One should always be in love. That's the reason one should never marry.

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated His ability.

Everyone is born a king, and most people die in exile.

Anybody can be good in the country.

The salesman knows nothing of what he is selling save that he is charging a great deal too much for it.