Quotes from Oscar Wilde

Musical people always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be perfectly deaf.

Never buy a thing you don't want merely because it is dear.

He is some brainless, beautiful creature, who should always be here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in the summer when we want something to chill our intelligence.

Well I won't argue about the matter. You always want to argue about things. That is exactly what things were originally made for.

Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses.

Love is like a war; easy to start but hard to end and you never know where it might take you.

In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor.

Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are.

Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibers, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself, and passion has its dreams.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.

Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.

Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.

To become the spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.

To most of us the real life is the life we do not lead.

A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

A book or poem which has no pity in it had better not be written.

A true gentlemen is one who is never unintentionally rude.

I know not whether laws be right, Or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol Is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, A year whose days are long.

Relations are simply a tedious pack of people who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.

It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone.

It is not the prisoners who need reformation, it is the prisons.

The only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.

To be on the alert is to live; to be lulled into security is to die.